The document discusses how businesses can build customer identities progressively throughout the customer journey to improve experiences and foster loyalty. It argues that businesses should obtain small amounts of anonymous customer data early to personalize experiences, then encourage registration by offering value in exchange for lightweight data like emails. A customer identity and access management (CIAM) system can integrate this data across systems and manage customer consent to privacy policies. By progressively building rich customer profiles while respecting privacy, businesses can deliver highly personalized experiences that increase trust and advocacy.

1. The Chutes and Ladders
of Customer Identity

2. 2
The Chutes and Ladders
of Customer Identity
The popular children’s board game
Chutes and Ladders™ (known in the UK
as “Snakes and Ladders”) actually has
its roots in ancient India. The game
itself is one of pure chance, but the
symbols are meant as lessons about a
binary system of morality. Chutes are
vices that set you back, and ladders are
virtues that move you forward.
This simple model is a good way to think about serving customers in today’s vast,
interconnected digital marketplace. If the game board represents the customer journey,
then for every new opportunity you find to delight and win over customers (ladders), you risk
inadvertently doing something annoying or disappointing that sends them away (chutes).
Starting the Climb
First, consider that every customer starts as an unknown visitor. Whether browsing for a new
pair of jeans from an online retailer, checking the schedules and prices on flights for their
next vacation, or watching movie trailers at a digital media streaming site, consumers are
free to anonymously wander the digital aisles of online commerce, searching or browsing for
goods and services they can buy, or content they can subscribe to.
To influence people’s purchasing decisions, businesses today continuously chase the
ultimate “ladder” of multi-channel marketing: delivering the right message to the right
person, at the right time, and through the right channels. But not only is each customer
different in how and when they connect with your brand, they also use a variety of vehicles
to get there: computers, mobile phones, tablets and a growing array of smart, connected
devices, via search engines, mobile apps, social feeds, and so on. This applies across the
entire customer lifecycle, from awareness to conversion to advocacy.
It’s become increasingly difficult to anticipate a customer’s next need or want and, with so
many possible touch points, it’s also tricky to determine where and how to answer that need.
The secret to climbing this ladder comes down to businesses understanding not just what
consumers do, but their actual identities and preferences. What are some of the barriers
preventing businesses from doing this?

3. 3
The Double-Edged Sword of Digital Marketing
People like being catered to. What they don’t is like being stalked, inconvenienced or
disrespected. Many “chutes” that take potential customers off the game board are the
direct result of businesses delivering irrelevant experiences because they don’t understand
enough about online visitors. In contrast, by gaining a truly unique view of each customer
across their entire journey, brands can offer experiences that win new business, as well
as long-term trust and loyalty. What does this look like in practice — across a few different
industries — from the customer’s point of view?
THERE’S NOT MUCH INTERACTION IN A
SINGLE HANDSHAKE
It can be difficult to establish a meaningful digital relationship through
a single touchpoint with an anonymous online visitor.
REGISTRATION DONE WRONG CAN DISRUPT THE
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
People quickly walk away if they encounter friction in their online
and mobile interactions.
NON-TRANSPARENT INTERACTIONS FEEL PERILOUS TO
CONSUMERS, NOT PERSONAL
Global privacy laws are broadening the scope of consumer protections.
This means it’s no longer acceptable — or even legal — for businesses to
stitch together user profiles from third-party information, behavior tracking,
or inferred attributes unless consumers have expressly given their consent.

4. 4
1A
2A
1B
2B
3B
3A
CHUTES
Annoying and frustrating
digital interactions
LADDERS
Enjoyable, satisfying and trusted
digital experiences
Retail and
ECommerce 1A I bought a pair of jeans from your online
store two weeks ago, and now I can’t
escape seeing ads for those same pants all over
the internet. This is creepy and annoying.
1B I bought a pair of jeans from your online store
two weeks ago, and I now see ads for items
on sale, like tops and shoes, that pair well with my new
jeans. It’s a bit like having my own fashion consultant!
Travel and
Hospitality
2A I want to book a European vacation next
summer, so I signed up for ther “Let’s Go
Euro!” newsletter on your travel site. Within days, my
inbox is cluttered with newsletters for all-inclusive
Aruba vacation packages and rental car specials, I
can’t figure out how to manage my settings on your
website, and clicking “unsubscribe” seems to have
the opposite of the desired effect. I’m out of here!
2B I signed up for the “Let’s Go Euro!” newsletter
on your travel site. I get one communication
per week, with clear and relevant information. After
booking my dream vacation via a link in the newsletter
and having a great experience on a five-country
European tour, I came back to your site, where it was
easy to sign up for an African safari-focused newsletter
to begin planning my next adventure.
Media and
Publication
3A My kids bought me a new tablet for
my birthday and I’m excited to start
watching my favorite shows on your streaming
site. To my dismay, when I try to log into my
existing account with my new device, there is no
history and my watchlist is empty, so I’m starting
from scratch. Why is this so hard?
4B When I download your app on my brand new
tablet, I choose to login with my Facebook profile.
Clicking the blue button, I consent to sharing my public
profile with the app and I’m instantly logged in, with access
to my watchlist and history. It’s like I never left! Also, since
my Facebook profile is now linked with my existing account,
my friends and I can chat about our favorite episodes and
recommend new shows to each other, right in the app.

5. 5
Win the Game of Delighting Customers:
Build Identities Progressively
How can businesses perform the delicate balancing act of executing one-to-one marketing
programs without driving away potential customers through irrelevant campaigns or intrusive
interactions?
The footprints people leave behind during their online wanderings form digital identities that
marketers can analyze, but you don’t build an identity overnight. You build it through an ongoing
exchange of information and value. In other words: a relationship. It makes sense for businesses
to capture information about online visitors as early as possible and in small pieces, to begin
establishing trust-based relationships and to better understand customers’ wants, needs and
preferences. This approach — known as “progressive identity” — demands a multi-pronged
strategy that includes:
• Offering online visitors value in the form of content such as promotions, coupons or
newsletters in exchange for small amount of information, without requiring registration for
full accounts.
• Obtaining and managing consent from customers throughout their entire lifecycle to build
enduring trust.
• Enabling convenient and centralized profile and preference management and ensuring
that customers can easily control their own data and privacy, to drive the transparent
experiences that customers increasingly expect and the law demands.
Businesses today look at identity the wrong way, by approaching customer identity as
a “binary” challenge. By viewing online visitors as either “known” versus “unknown” or
“registered” versus “unregistered”, they are missing multiple opportunities to begin building
identity progressively, earlier in the customer journey, and throughout the entire lifecycle. This
is spurring the rise of the customer identity and access management (CIAM) industry.
CIAM is all about creating a seamless, transparent and engaging experience for customers, no
matter where they are in their journey. Let’s examine the steps along the way, the features that
improve the experience for each one, and the benefits businesses can expect to see as a result.
Ask for Consent to Personalize the Experience — From the Beginning
A customer’s journey might begin anonymously, but that doesn’t mean they should
have a generic experience. To address this, many companies have invested in
behavioral tracking technologies such as data management platforms (DMPs) or
personalization engines in order to customize each visitor’s experience from the very
first touchpoint. But to do this, even anonymous visitors’ privacy must be respected,
and that means acquiring their consent to be tracked.
Today, many businesses display consent terms before placing cookies on an anonymous visitor’s
browser, stating that the purpose is to enhance the visitor’s experience. If that business can

6. 6
continue to manage the customer’s consent going forward and demonstrate transparency
at the very first touchpoint, it can establish trust that enhances the value of the brand for that
customer throughout the lifetime of that relationship. Plus, this managed consent protects the
business from penalties associated with evolving data protection laws and regulations and the
brand degradation that can stem from abusing customers’ privacy. But how does the business
manage that consent, and can this be done throughout that customer’s entire lifecycle?
As brands ask for permission when exchanging value for information with customers, a
dedicated CIAM solution can help them manage that consent across their entire journey and
progressively build rich, self-service profiles. This ensures that customers’ privacy is respected,
and that they remain verifiably in control of their own information.
Here’s another example: Let’s say a registered customer visits a brand’s site but doesn’t log in. If a
CIAM platform is in place that is integrated with a DMP, a unique identifier from the DMP is tied to
the customer’s profile during the registration process, merging that customer’s identity data with
cookie-based data from the DMP. This unified information can then be fed to a recommendation
engine to drive a personalized experience, even if that customer isn’t logged in.
Try a Lighter Touch
Now we’ve imagined the beginning of a new customer journey, but what comes
next? To move this anonymous visitor down the funnel and continue building
the relationship, brands should offer incentives such as special offers, sale
events, newsletters or whatever is likely to be of value to that person. Then, the
business can deliver that value in exchange for just an email address or mobile
number. Marketers are thus encouraging a transparent, value-for-information
transaction without adding undue friction to the customer’s experience.
This approach to lightweight registration has long been used by email service providers
(ESPs) to manage newsletter subscriptions and email campaigns. But why keep an email
address in a single silo — for a single purpose — when it can be a gateway identifier for
building out a rich and accurate customer identity?
If the signup process is powered by a CIAM solution, that in turn can feed data to an ESP,
that email address then becomes the foundation for a profile that is progressively built over
the customer’s entire lifecycle. Also, with CIAM as the central hub for customer identity,
email addresses can be synced across CRM or DMP databases, analytics or personalization
engines, or any other systems that utilize them.
Removing the password requirement avoids a barrier for the customer to engage, while the
business collects valuable attributes such as an email address and preferences that can then
be built up over time. Another consideration in this scenario is that the business isn’t always
starting with only that initial data. From the encounter itself, marketers also know:
• Whether this customer arrived via an organic search, a paid campaign or referral
• What device they connected with
• What the actual offer or content was that converted them

7. 7
That customer’s experience can now be tailored from these data points.
Finally, as we’ve mentioned before, just because someone provides an email address for
the “Let’s Go Euro” newsletter doesn’t mean they’ve given their consent for that business
to bombard them with emails about all-inclusive Aruba vacation packages or rental car
specials. In many cases, doing this can constitute a violation of consumer privacy rights.
For example, as of May 2018, if a subscriber resides in Europe and receives unwanted
messages, the brand sending them may fall out of compliance with the EU’s General Data
Protection Regulation (GDPR) and be subject to hefty fines! The core offerings of top CIAM
solutions can help businesses track and manage customer consent to avoid inadvertent
violation of data privacy and protection rules.
Want More Registered Customers? Offer Them Value
(and an Easy Way In)
Anyone registered with a favorite brand’s app or site knows the value of having
an active account. With a certain well-known (and enormous) online retailer, for
example, all you have to do is enter their site or mobile app to easily see your
entire purchase history, place recurring orders, make purchases with a single click,
manage your shipping and payment options, and more. Also, content and product
recommendations are dynamically tailored to your interests and history, making for a
more engaging experience.
Well-designed registration and login flows that minimize friction are important, but businesses can
go even further. How? By augmenting traditional authentication with biometric methods such as
fingerprint, facial, voice or iris recognition, inherently risky password processes can be replaced
with elements that are not only hard to hack, but also make it even easier for customers to identify
themselves. Then, risk-based authentication (RBA) can be employed to combat fraud by stepping
up security for suspicious behaviors without punishing real customers. Additional factors of
authentication can be added, including one-time passwords delivered over SMS, to secure higher
risk transactions or to enable customers to customize their own level of security per site, app or
device.
As with all other stages of the customer journey, consent remains vitally important when
customers create a full account. To drive a dynamic and engaging experience, data should be
continuously added to a person’s profile over time and synchronized to downstream marketing,
sales and services technologies. This is why obtaining express permission to capture personal
information and enabling self-service control over profile and preferences is absolutely crucial.
It allows the brand to continuously evolve and fine-tune each customer’s experience without
incurring new risks, while fostering ongoing trust and loyalty.
A CIAM platform is designed specifically to build, protect and manage customer identities that fuel
personalized, permission-based marketing — and can help brands deliver customer experiences
that can look like this:

8. 8
Bob, a first-time visitor to an outdoor adventure retail site, is browsing for ski jackets and
adds one to his shopping cart. Clicking the checkout button, Bob chooses to create an
account using his Facebook profile. As part of the login flow, he accepts terms stating that
only the profile data that he’s made public in his Facebook profile will be collected, and that
the brand will not post or advertise to his feed without his consent. After clicking through the
login screen, Bob is greeted by name and, based on the location of his device, is offered
a free shipping option to pick up his new jacket at a nearby store, along with an in-store
coupon for 30 percent off any full-price snowsport item in the store. When Bob picks up
his jacket, a sales associate asks if he’d like to be on the mailing list for a new, ski-themed
newsletter featuring clinics, vacations and special offers on gear.
Trust and Transparency: Your Competitive Advantage
Plenty of businesses are still in the dark ages when it comes to respecting
the privacy of their customer’s data. The reality, in the age of the customer,
is simple: First-party data is king. While spend on third-party data remains
strong, there is a growing trend toward businesses wanting to capture
first-party data directly from customers. Why?
For one, first-party attributes combined with third-party profile data increase
the accuracy of look-a-like and suppression modeling. Secondly, when used correctly,
accurate first-party data managed across the entire buyer lifecycle makes true one-to-one,
cross-channel marketing possible. Finally, considering the ongoing expansion of consumer
protections by regulators around the globe, protecting customers’ privacy is not just
smart business strategy, it’s the law. To stay in compliance — and to deliver a trustworthy
experience — brands should ensure that each customer’s journey is imbued with
transparency at every step, and that each customer is in control of their own information.
This is why top CIAM solutions allow customers to manage their preferences and profile
data, giving them the ability to easily freeze and delete accounts, download their own
profile data, and change newsletter opt-in and social network preferences. The best CIAM
platforms also sync customer records with downstream applications and services that act
on that data, so profile and preference changes are always reflected across the entire tech
stack. These best-practice CIAM capabilities can also help to evolve the customer data
policies of the business itself, encouraging “privacy by design” practices that further boost
customer trust and brand reputation.
Loyalty Is Royalty
No matter how a customer is won, through a direct sales process or a journey
through multiple online and offline channels, that initial purchase, subscription
or membership sign-up should be just the first step of a journey toward lifetime
loyalty and advocacy.
Businesses that can personalize the experience at every turn can not only
drive more revenue through on-site engagement, but can also learn more

9. 9
about each customer’s behaviors and preferences, creating a virtuous cycle of long-term
growth. The more a customer engages, the more their dataset increases in quantity and
quality. A more robust and accurate profile helps to create ever more consistent, personalized
experience for that customer. Also, insights gleaned from that data can be used to build
valuable look-alike models to target only the best potential customers, helping to optimize
both campaign costs and conversion rates.
Loyal customers can become your best advertising, since, no matter how sophisticated digital
marketing technologies become, nothing will ever match word-of-mouth for promoting brands
and enhancing their value. Once a customer is recognized, the next thing to do is make sure
they have something good to share with their network. There are a number of ways to do this.
For example, capturing likes and preferences, such as someone’s favorite team, artist or restaurant,
can inform accurate segmentation that drives more effective campaigns. That’s just the beginning.
Combined with those attributes, behavioral data from customer pageviews, click-throughs and
streaming media can help build a more detailed customer profile that grows in value over time and
enables true, one-to-one marketing that encourages return visits and brand advocacy.
Businesses should also make it easy and fun for customers to share and react to content
or products, leave and reply to comments, or review products and services. Over time, this
results in dynamic, living digital spaces that keep people engaged longer. Signals generated
by their behaviors can help marketers uncover valuable insights and social trends that can
sharpen customized digital marketing programs and programmatic advertising.
Once this kind of engaging environment is established, customers should be rewarded for
things they already do on-site or in-app. For instance, scores might be assigned to actions
such as commenting or uploading content, with customers tracking their progress and
achievements via leaderboards, badges and labels, or real-time notifications. Analytics
applied to the data generated by these activities can help tie on-site behaviors to individual
users, enabling pinpoint campaigns, recommendations and more, all of which enhance
customers’ experience and keep them coming back for more.
The Bottom Line? Be a Good Friend to your Customers
Think about your closest friends. How did your relationships
develop? Were you fast friends the minute you met? Unlikely. Also,
what makes them such good friends? Is it simply that they’re smart
or funny, or because they’re good listeners who pay attention to
what you tell them, know your quirks and how to make you laugh?
So it goes with customer relationships. The best way to start a
new customer relationship isn’t with a questionnaire. Consumers
are looking for relatable experiences that make them feel
comfortable and valued, and their level of trust for exchanging information with brands is
directly commensurate with the benefits they perceive. By imagining a day in a customer’s life,
brands can begin to understand how they might fit into it, allowing them to market not just to
people, but to moments in people’s everyday lives.

10. 10
Renee’s Big Vacation Journey
Renee is searching for accommodations for her next vacation. She
arrives at a hotel’s website and begins to explore. She looks up
locations, room availability, prices, the hotel’s fitness center and
on-premise dining options. After several minutes of exploration, she
bookmarks the site for later.
The next week, Renee returns to the hotel’s website to check room
availability again, as well as the hotel’s proximity to local attractions. While
she doesn’t book anything on her second visit, Renee does sign up for a
promotion: “Get a Special Upgrade Package When You Book in June!”,
providing her personal email address. This triggers an email offering an
upgrade package featuring a free spa treatment if she books a room
within the month. A big fan of spa days, Renee clicks a link in the email
that takes her to a promotional landing page and learns that the packaged
offered is available during her planned vacation!
On her third visit, Renee books a poolside room, also deciding to sign
up for the hotel group’s loyalty program, entering a username and
password, her first and last name, and her mobile phone number, which
are stored in her profile along with her email address.
Now that she’s joined the loyalty program and provided key personal
details, the hotel can cater offers to Renee. Each time she receives an
email from the loyalty program, she’s asked a question with a simple
drop-down answer field. Over time, the hotel learns that Renee’s preferred
activities and interests include “staying in and reading books by the
fireplace”, “hiking and biking”, “shopaholic” and “country club regular.”
The hotel can now include conditional fields based on her interests,
to be filled on-site or through the ongoing email campaign. This might
include questions about Renee’s favorite retail clothing brands and
booksellers in the area. Next, Renee begins receiving offers from the
hotel’s affiliates, but she’s not interested in any of these, so she logs
into her profile and changes her newsletter subscription preferences
to “hotel only”. Finally, once Renee has booked her airfare, she “likes”
the hotel’s Facebook profile and posts a comment about her trip and
accommodations, which pops up on her Facebook newsfeed.
Unknown and
Searching for Value!
A Brand Advocate
is Born!
Booked: Deluxe
Room and
Loyalty Program!
Cookied
and Saved!
Progressive
Profiling
in Action!
Email
Captured!
Narrowing
it Down!
Let’s look at an example of a vacationer shopping for a hotel:

11. 11
This kind of soft-touch, progressive strategy can be used by any brand to maximize
conversion opportunities, by unlocking new cross-sell and upsell opportunities based on
customers’ preferences, likes, purchase history and more. When checking out a cocktail
dress for an upcoming party, for example, a shopper who’s expressed a preference for
certain clothing combinations in the past might see: “Pair that adorable little black dress with
these equally cute wedges!”
Hitting the Magic “100”
The game of Chutes and Ladders ends when the first player lands on the hundredth square
at the top of the board, but, in today’s fiercely competitive business landscape, there is no
finish line. The key to ongoing success is building a strategy for continually understanding and
responding to what customers want, delivering delightful, personalized experiences that stand
out from the competition without trampling on the rights of increasingly savvy customers.
It’s not easy, but with careful planning, innovative thinking, and a robust and flexible solution
that includes a way to securely collect, manage and leverage customer identity data, the
game board for smart marketers can become a playground of opportunity.
To learn how 700 leading global brands trust Gigya to create more valued and trusted
customer relationships for more than 1.3 billion customer identities, visit Gigya.com.
100 99 98 97

12. © 2017 Gigya, Inc. | 2513 Charleston Road #200, Mountain View, CA 94043 | T : (650) 353.7230 | www.gigya.com
Gigya, the Gigya logo, and Customer Identity Management Platform are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Gigya Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. All other
trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Gigya does not own any end user data or maintain any other rights to this data, other than utilizing it to make Gigya’s services available
to our clients and their end users. Gigya acts as an agent or back-end vendor of its client’s website or mobile application, to which the end user of our client granted permissions (if applicable).
Gigya facilitates the collection, transfer and storage of end user data solely on behalf of its clients and at its clients’ direction. For more information, please see Gigya’s Privacy Policy, available at
http://www.gigya.com/privacy-policy/.
Gigya_White_Paper_The_Chutes_and_Ladders_of_Customer_Identity_201704
The Leader in Customer
Identity Management
About Gigya
Gigya’s Customer Identity Management Platform helps companies
build better customer relationships by turning unknown site visitors
into known, loyal and engaged customers. With Gigya’s technology,
businesses increase registrations and identify customers across
devices, consolidate data into rich customer profiles, and provide
better service, products and experiences by integrating data into
marketing and service applications.
Gigya’s platform was designed from the ground up for social
identities, mobile devices, consumer privacy and modern marketing.
Gigya provides developers with the APIs they need to easily build
and maintain secure and scalable registration, authentication, profile
management, data analytics and third-party integrations.
More than 700 of the world’s leading businesses such as Fox, Forbes,
and ASOS rely on Gigya to build identity-driven relationships and to
provide scalable, secure Customer Identity Management.
To learn how Gigya can help your business manage customer
identities, visit gigya.com, or call us at 650.353.7230.