News & Analysis

Digital Identity Trends to Dominate in 2020

Digital Identity

By Rakesh Soni

For organizations, providing a smooth and seamless online user experience has never been more critical. As consumer expectations and demands increase, businesses are under considerable pressure to streamline their customers’ online journey.

A new research from Qualtrics shows that more than two-thirds of a company’s competitive edge relies on the digital experience they furnish to their customers. In a nutshell, optimizing every customer touch point throughout their journey becomes essential. To achieve this, companies first need to grasp their consumer behavior, including the authentication methods they prefer, if they like multi-factor authentication via email or SMS, and performance benchmarks they expect for login pages and registration.

LoginRadius has encapsulated a top 10 list of its key digital identity trends in the report. (Read the full report here). Based on the findings, we believe, the following trends are likely to evolve in 2020 and will shape the way brands interact with their customers.

  1. Registration Forms: The amount of data a company collates during registration has a massive influence on the customer experience. For instance, consumers now anticipate websites to offer a quick and simple registration process. Otherwise, they run the risk of users abandoning their website without converting. As per our research, 78% of the organizations are using five to seven fields on their registration forms, with 26.45% using five, 28.21% using six, and 22.92% using seven.
  2. Forgotten Passwords: In the current digital landscape, companies need to focus on reducing as much friction during the authentication process as possible. To get insight into the accessibility of the authentication procedure, we checked the percentage of customers who use the “Forgot My Password” module. We discovered that 39% of active users use the “Forgot my password” feature. Of those customers, 84.68% actually retrieve their passwords and 15.32% never change their password.
  3. Username vs Email ID: The most widely used authentication method currently being offered by businesses is the standard login. With this procedure, a user registers and logs in with a unique ID and password. This unique ID could either be the username that they create or an existing email address. Our results demonstrated that 95.57% of companies offer standard login using an email ID, and only 4.43% offer standard login using a username.
  4. Password less Login: One method that companies have gradually been adopting to achieve the minimum amount of friction during authentication is password less login. This tool allows businesses to create an efficient authentication process by removing the inconvenience of memorizing yet another password. Our research discovered that, of the customers who use password less login, 93.65% prefer to log in with their email address, and 6.35% prefer to log in with their phone number.
  5. Multi-Factor Authentication: Delivering an efficient customer experience can be a tricky business when also keeping data security in mind. More organizations, however, have been incorporating multi-factor authentication (MFA) to help secure their customers’ identities while sustaining a good user experience. Basis of our research, the two most widely used verification methods are SMS messaging and authentication apps. Of the customers who use multi-factor authentication (MFA), 63.1% use MFA via SMS messaging. 28.3% of companies offer multi-factor authentication.
  6. Customer Return Rate: Enhancing your customer return rate is invariably dependent on delivering your customers a seamless experience throughout their journey. It implies that every touchpoint needs to be as efficient as possible, or customers may choose not to return. Furnishing a cohesive experience means looking critically at the authentication methods that are being used. Our research demonstrated that phone login has the highest return rate of 27.1%. Next is password less login with 19.5%, then social login with 15.3%, and finally standard login with 11.5%.
  7. Login Preference by Age: Although advanced authentication methods are gradually becoming more popular, the most widely used are still standard login and social login. In the recent past years, social login has grown quite a bit in popularity, but standard login still tends to be used the most. When comparing login preference by age, our data reflected that 78.41% of over 50-year-olds prefer using standard login and 68.48% of 18-25-year-olds prefer social login.
  8. Login Preference by Gender: When differentiating login preferences by gender, we can see with the help of our data that there is no notable difference. Our discoveries demonstrate that58.31% of females prefer standard login over social login. Similarly, 52.45% of males prefer standard login over social login.
  9. Social Login Preferences by Geography: Social login has persistently been one of the most popular login procedures, as it enables customers a quick and easy way to authenticate and gain access. It also happens to be incredibly convenient, as it lets customer log in using a wide variety of existing social network accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. When collating all the data, regardless of the users’ region, we can see that Facebook and Google are dominant.  Facebook is preferred by 41.20% of users, and Google is preferred by 32.63% of users.
  10. Login Preference by Businesses: When deciding which authentication method to offer your users, it is essential not to forget the customer experience. It means taking into consideration the ease of use, security, as well which method is most widely preferred.

From a business perspective, we found that 59% of companies have adopted standard login, whereas 34.4% offer social login, 4.4% offer phone login, and 1.29% offer password-less login.

(Disclaimer: The author is the chief executive officer at LoginRadius and the views expressed here are his own and may not be in sync with those held by the publication)

Leave a Response

Sohini Bagchi
Sohini Bagchi is Editor at CXOToday, a published author and a storyteller. She can be reached at [email protected]