By: Jesse Cryderman

Dig past the marketing rhetoric and it’s clear that the technological gap between competing CSPs is narrowing. 

“As price and performance across providers converge, the account service and support, in many instances, becomes the differentiator,” said Frank Perazzini, Director of telecommunications at J.D. Power and Associates. 

CSPs are starting to view CEM as a vital tool that can help them stand out from the crowd, acquire new subscribers, increase the “stickiness” of their services (i.e., reduce churn and improve loyalty), and accelerate growth.

One new area where CSPs can differentiate and deliver a much more compelling customer service is unified identity management. Also known as single-sign on, the management of digital identity in a unified, pervasive and secure manner will be a major trend in 2014 and beyond. Who will be the stewards of online identity? CSPs have a major play here, as the original alternative identity managers (phone numbers). Also, everyone already uses their phone as their always-on digital life portal, so it makes sense that the smartphone become the single identity authenticator.

Identity as a service

Unified identity solutions can enable CSPs as well as the enterprise IT departments they service to centrally manage identities across on-premise, data center, cloud and mobile environments. These solutions can range from basic authentication, access and privilege management to logging, policy control, and regulatory compliance. These tools deliver a single, secure, federated login that makes life easier for both users and IT departments.

In the consumer space, the need for unified identity services is considerable, and explains, in part, why Facebook and Google have succeeded in becoming federated ID providers (more on that later). Consumers are battling subscription fatigue to a greater degree than they ever have in the past. Consider a typical consumer; in today’s subscription economy, he or she manages 20 or more digital identities. These range from video content (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime), to gaming (XBOX Live, Playstation Network), to web-based apps (DropBox, Office 365), to social media (Facebook, Yammer, LinkedIn), to OTT communications apps (Skype, Viber, WhatsApp), and many more

For the enterprise customer, the needs are even greater, as are the risks. Most enterprises store user information across multiple systems, grant partner and customer access to some systems, and must accommodate some form of regulatory compliance. Complicating matters, many businesses are hopping on the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) bandwagon, which requires additional work to secure the mobile side of things. More and more IT resources, systems and data exist outside of the enterprise firewall than ever before, but IT departments must still have control and visibility to meet regulatory and security requirements.

Unified identity promises seamless access for users and security, control, and time savings for IT departments; CSPs are well-positioned to offer this solution as a service to both groups.