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Search engines, social networks, banks and credit card companies already collect and maintain huge data stores on their users. So do major retailers and service providers, to the extent customers allow personal information to be handed over to them.
Now, any company that does business through digital channels can manage its own customer information using a new cloud service from identity management software provider Gigya.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company on Dec. 7 introduced Profile Management, an identity repository designed to manage all types of cross-channel customer identity data, which automatically maintains privacy compliance and stores user records securely.
Using Profile Management, enterprises can manage all customer data in a unified, flexible, scalable and SaaS-based identity repository and use a single customer view to build useful, permission-based customer profiles.
The company made the announcement at the Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit in Las Vegas.
“It’s becoming more and more important for global enterprises to understand their customers in order to drive personalization and customization,” Gigya Senior Director of Technology Strategy Suresh Sridharan told eWEEK. “Our repository acts as a single source of truth for customer identity information that can be used across multiple different assets within the company.”
Gigya’s Profile Management cloud service captures and manages customer data from registrations, on-site behaviors, transactions, demographics, mobile applications, social profiles and offline data sourced from multiple systems. All these metrics are becoming increasingly important to marketers as companies upgrade their customer experience platforms in order to keep current customers and attract new ones.
Sridharan said Gigya built its Profile Management identity repository proprietarily with a dynamic schema, differentiating from hierarchical, employee-facing identity repositories and making it possible for businesses to collect and normalize an unlimited volume and variety of both structured and unstructured first-party customer data.
Profile Management’s elastic scale allows it to manage hundreds of millions of customer identities without adverse impacts on performance, Sridharan said. Additionally, all data is fully indexed and tied to individual customer identities, making it effortless to search and segment the information via either a REST-like API or an easy-to-use UI by any combination of attributes, a critical component for intelligent customer identity and access management (CIAM).
The vast geographical distribution of customers and multiple social and regional privacy regulations have necessitated businesses’ use of multiple global data centers. Gigya’s Profile Management identity repository is comprised of several international data centers, which allow for data localization while still providing enterprises with a single, holistic view of their respective customer bases, Sridharan said.
This should work well within new privacy constraints that will soon be standard in European Union countries.
In summary, the key features of Gigya’s Profile Management include:
–management of customer data in local geographies via dispersed international data centers;
–automatic social network privacy compliance and identity data updates;
–fully customizable end-user-facing preference management;
–unification of both online and offline customer data;
–ISO27001 certification;
–real-time backup and disaster recovery.