How to Keep Customers Safe with Authentication

A more secure user experience requires authentication solutions throughout the data or account access process, including MFA upon login, ensuring that new signups are legitimate, securing high-value transactions, and securely supporting users who forget their passwords or lose their devices. 

Read on to discover all of the basics of keeping your customers safe with authentication. We’ll cover why authentication is so important, which authentication areas to focus on, and the steps to implementing successful authentication procedures. If you’re ready to start protecting your customers' data and gain brand trust and loyalty, you’ll need to partner with a trusted security and authentication solutions provider like Unifonic. Talk to an expert today to get started.

Enhanced User Experience and Security Helps to Retain Customers

Customer trust is vital to the success of your business, and customers are concerned about the security of their data and accounts. Today, it's more important than ever for businesses to ensure that their security processes and authentication procedures are up to date and effective at keeping sensitive information within accounts secure. Whether you’re a financial service provider or an e-commerce brand, authentication is becoming increasingly crucial to ensuring a secure customer experience online amidst more sophisticated cyber scams and rising privacy concerns. 

While your authentication solution should prioritize privacy, it must also be modern and friction-reducing when it comes to the user journey. Your security services should never detract from your customers' overall online experience. Ultimately, this balancing act of security and user experience is key to achieving customer retention, and a modern, trusted security solution provider like Unifonic can help you succeed.

Authentication Areas to Focus On

You may feel like you’re ready to enhance your business cyber security with authentication, but where should you start? While it's important to address the specific security needs and risks that your unique customers face within your business sector, these are a few authentication areas that are always great to improve upon.

Ensure That New Signups are From Real People

Before you invest in securing accounts, it's crucial to ensure that the accounts being created are from real people, and worth protecting! Fraudulent accounts can be prevented through a secure signup flow, with added steps to identify potentially fraudulent or bot behavior. ReCAPTCHA authentication can prevent robots from creating accounts, and you should be sure to verify a phone number in addition to an email address. 

Prevent Data Breaches with MFA

Data breaches are becoming a more common occurrence, and businesses that are not utilizing multi-factor authentication are at a much higher risk. Today, it’s ineffective to rely on only a username and password for login, and an additional step needs to be taken. 

The quickest way to enhance your authentication is through one-time passwords (OTPs) sent directly to your customer to verify their identity. OTP can be delivered through various channels making it very accessible.

Secure Your High-Value Transactions

Even after a user has signed into their account, you may need to continue your authentication process —especially when it comes to high-value transactions. If your users are performing high-value translations such as large money transfers or deleting or sending large amounts of data, additional authentication is necessary.

Consider promoting your customer to re-enter their password, or send another OTP through SMS before the large transaction can be completed. Your authentication process, especially in these cases, must be efficient and fast to ensure a great customer experience.

Securely Support Users Who Lose Passwords or Devices

Even with perfected signup and login experiences, users will inevitably forget their passwords or lose their devices, rendering themselves unable to log in. Your access recovery process should be extremely secure and should be efficient to ensure it's not frustrating for customers to recover their accounts. 

Avoid the high costs of ongoing support agents with a self-service process! Secure, automated processes make account recovery easier for your customers and your support team. When a customer starts the recovery process, never confirm if the account exists or display its credentials, even if the user enters an account name that does not exist. Disclosing that a user has an account, and what the username is, can compromise your customer’s privacy. Finally, note that while sending a reset link via email is a common approach, SMS is your best option as it's harder to intercept.

Steps to Strong Customer Authentication

Having a strong plan of action will help your business to achieve strong customer authentication that works effectively and has longevity. Below are 5 steps for successful implementation of enhanced security and account authentication. 

• Goal setting and analysis

First, it's important to determine what problems your business is trying to solve and set specific and achievable security goals that you will be trying to reach. 

• Research

Completing ample research will ensure that you make the best security choices for your business and your customers. Look for information on best practices from solution providers and experts in the field, and determine what solutions are relevant to your analysis. 

• Provider selection 

With clear goals prepared, and research completed, it's time to select the best provider for your specific security and authentication needs. Choose a trustworthy provider that specializes in authentication, adheres to security best practices, and makes the process seamless for both customers and your business. 

• User education

Equipped with your new security measures, it's time to ensure that your customers are prepared to use it. Notify your existing customers ahead of time, explaining that new security measures are being added, and their benefits. If possible, allow your customers to set up their preferred account authentication method before it takes effect. 

• Monitoring and maintaining 

Your authentication and security steps need to be maintained over time to ensure they continue to protect your customers effectively. A trusted authentication provider like Unifonic will provide updates to their services over time to stay apace with new threats and risks.

Moving Towards the Future of Authentication with Unifonic

Customers are placing an increasing emphasis on brand trust when making purchasing decisions, and judge this trust upon business security strategies. Striking the perfect balance between security and usability is the most effective way to ensure that your customers have ongoing trust in your business and their cyber security.

While executing a new authentication strategy can seem daunting, it doesn’t have to be. When you choose Unifonic for your authentication needs, you’re choosing an account, log-in, and transaction verification system that is easily integrated and provides global coverage for your customers. Our omnichannel approach allows your users to authenticate on whatever channel they prefer while being managed on one single, simple platform. Talk to an expert today, schedule your free demo, and get started on offering your customers the very best when it comes to cyber security.