Why identity is a key element of the CX journey

ATRI CHATTERJEE:

One of the things that all these companies benefited from was when you provided them, a better identity management experience. The simplest way of thinking about identity management is the starting with the front door – logging in getting into a service, as simple as that. That's how you start your journey with the provider, right? With a company. You go to a retail outlet, you log in. That's the first thing you have to do. What's interesting is that this study showed that 40% of all helpdesk costs were due to the whole forgotten password and password reset process.

STACI SATTERWHITE:

Welcome to this episode of CX Confessions. I am Stacy Satterwhite, the Chief Operating Officer here at Khoros. A title change for me. I am joined today by Anastasia Darby, our Director of Strategic Development at Khoros. Anastasia is a leader in our Strategic Services business, an organization that I am now leading and learning more about, and I am incredibly excited to work closely with Anastasia on this podcast and the Strategic Services organization moving forward. Welcome, Anastasia.

ANASTACIA DARBY:

Thank you so much for having me today. I am really excited.

STACI SATTERWHITE:

Super excited to have your perspective of all things strategic services and marketing in this episode and even about identity management and how that impacts CX.

ANASTACIA DARBY:

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me today. I am excited to dig in with our guest, Atri and chat more about that across, you know, our B2B and B2C customers and how that might differ for each of the different customer types.

STACI SATTERWHITE:

Love it! Today, I am excited to talk with Atri Chatterjee. Atri, is the Chief Marketing Officer of ForgeRock, a San Francisco-based access management software company that's on a mission to create simple and secure identity experiences so users never have to log in again. I think that's called frictionless. Atri has more than 30 years experience in marketing in a variety of technology companies from startups to large established organizations. He's also run his own consulting company and helped clients develop and implement their go-to-market plans. Before that, he was CMO of a leading cloud security company Zscaler where he rebuilt its marketing team, developed and executed their go-to-market strategy, and helped the company prepare for its IPO in early 2018. No small feat, having been through a couple of IPOs myself. His experience also includes leading marketing and business units at enterprise security companies, such as Semantic and Secure Computing, which was acquired by McAfee, and marketing technology companies such as Act-On Software and Responsys, which was also acquired by Oracle where he was on the founding team. Super excited to hear from Atri today. Let us stick around what he has to say about digital identity, security, and how that all plays together with CX. Welcome, Atri to this episode of CX Confessions.

ATRI CHATTERJEE:

Thanks, Staci. I am so happy to be here.

STACI SATTERWHITE:

Happy to have you. You have such an impressive career and have spanned leadership roles across a lot of prominent tech companies. I would love to hear a little bit about your journey that led to you being the Chief Marketing Officer at ForgeRock.

ATRI CHATTERJEE:

Yes, Staci. It's a long journey because I am also a pretty old person

STACI SATTERWHITE:

You and me both, Atri.

ATRI CHATTERJEE:

Oh yeah, I don't know you and I don't think you know how old I am. But anyway, leave that one alone. I have been in this business for over 30 years. So, to give you some perspective and I started off as a software developer. I studied computer science and then started off as a programmer and then got onto the business side by taking on product management and product marketing. And then, sort of evolved from that into being – doing general marketing, I’ve been in sales, and eventually, being a CMO at a few companies.

And a lot of my industry expertise has been really and sort of three major areas. One of them is security software. I have been doing security software for almost 20 years. The other one is marketing automation. I also am fortunate enough to be a founder of a company that was one of the early pioneers in the space of marketing automation. That was also a company that was one of the earliest cloud-based software companies. And now, of course, the cloud is the big rage. But when we started that company back in 99, 1999 that is, we are one of the very early cloud companies and it was called Responsys and it was to do marketing on the web. It ended up becoming a public company and then becoming part of Oracle. So, that was the history of that company.

I did have some experience on the consumer side because was the head of marketing for the consumer division of McAfee. So they had a business-to-business part of the business, and then they had a consumer part, and I was on the consumer side for a few years and so that gave me some consumer’s experience.

STACI SATTERWHITE:

What a wide variety background! Very different, of course, any kind of consumer business than a B2B.

ATRI CHATTERJEE:

They're very different in several ways and they're also similar in certain ways. They're actually a lot of interesting things that you can take across from the consumer side onto the business side.

Particularly when we talk about things like user experience, you know? How do you reduce friction? And we had a term, a few years ago, that was called the consumerization of IT. And that's an important thing because I think it's still happening now, which is how do we bring that consumer-style experience into the business world so that things don't have to be all difficult to do and cumbersome.

We have always assumed that end business users, they always put up with the level of pain and we have always assumed that the consumers to get transactions going, you have to eliminate the pain. You have to cut down the number of obstacles so that they can quickly get to what they're looking for. Well, that's now moved over to the business side of things as well.

STACI SATTERWHITE:

So interesting. I think that might be in part recognition, that sure, big businesses are big businesses, but at the end of the day, all the individuals in it are human, right? So they need and want that same kind of individual experience that we’re more used to doing on the consumer side.

ATRI CHATTERJEE:

Absolutely. And that's exactly the point and that has become even more profound when you have people using consumer devices, all the time. And now we use those consumer devices like our iPhones and Android phones for business. So we're interacting with these things every day. Why can't my experience in my company or in my organization be similar to the experience I have on the outside internet?

ANASTACIA DARBY:

I think that's so fascinating. I think one of my favorite things that I took away from a conference one time was just that conversation around B2B or B2C, but really, it's all B2H. It's all business-to-human. And really considering the customer experience, the community experience on all ends of it. I would love to learn more about, kind of your role of, you know, CMO at ForgeRock and kind of dig in there a little bit further.

ATRI CHATTERJEE:

Maybe I can start with maybe telling you a little bit about ForgeRock to give you a little background into what the company does. So, ForgeRock is a software platform, it's a software company that is built around identity and access management. And so, what we do is we provide a platform for identity and access management, and we typically sell this into organizations. Those organizations could be companies, they could be governments, it could be a variety of different types of organizations, and they could use that to manage the identities of their consumers. So it's a business-to-business-to-consumer, a B2B2C.

Or, they could be using that to manage the identities of their workforce, people who work for them – their employees, their contractors, and things like that. In some cases, we have even got companies that use our identity and access management to manage the identity of things. Because now what's happening is there are a lot of things, right? Really not humans, right? There are, for example, we have got BMW as a customer, we have got Toyota is a customer, and one of the things that BMW has a project going on is the connected car and with the connected car, it's really about how do I manage all those cars, associate them to their owners, have information about them, and so on. So, it's quite an intriguing thing where all of these different things are coming together. Identity, it turns out is really a fundamental piece of managing things online. It's a sort of like a crucial piece of the equation and it's become even more important.

ANASTACIA DARBY:

And it's fascinating. I mean, I have been thinking a lot about this just, you know, as travel picks up throughout summer and any go in and there are so many different ways that your identity is managed even just through the travel process, going to the airport, and there's a variety of options for that now. But from your perspective, why is identity such an important component of CX today and how has digital transformation of businesses has made it even more crucial in recent years? Like, what is it about this moment right now?

ATRI CHATTERJEE:

Yeah, and that's a great question. And, you know, we were talking about my background a little earlier, and I was prior to coming to ForgeRock, I was at a company called Zscaler, which was in the network security space and the concept of providing network security, you know, to companies and to and employees within those organizations in the cloud. And why it relates to identity and the importance of identity in today's world is, you know, there's some major trends going on right now.

We often talk about digital transformation. What is that really mean? That just means that a lot of businesses are going digital. There are transacting online and of course, the pandemic has only accentuated that, and we are all witness to that, and we experienced that. But what's really happening underneath? Right? And why is this digital transformation so, such a big issue? Well, you know, and why does it relate to identity? Because what's happened with this digital transformation, is that a few interesting things have happened. One is this whole concept of being protected by a perimeter of security is no longer valid, right?

Because that concept of particularly when you're in your company or in your organization and you typically were inside a network, but people don't work like that anymore. We're all over the place. Most people don't even, you know, the way work is done, now has changed. People don't even go into the office. They're connecting from their home network. So, people are not on a network that can be protected by a perimeter. Because they're out on the on, in the wild network, in the on the internet, you have also got people with devices like all of us are using our devices, multiple devices: iPads, iPhones, obviously a traditional computer – all to conduct business. We don't distinguish between what we do in our personal lives, and business.

So, that's another thing that's happened and, of course, we're all mobile, you talked about being in the airport and going places where people work from anywhere now, right? And you have folks working from various places, they, you know, and the pandemic has only accentuated that. So now, it becomes really important.

If you don't know what network someone's on, you don't know what device say using, they could be using a personal device. You don't know where they are located. It's really important to try to figure out who they are and now identity solves that problem. Like identity has become an important piece of that. Trying to figure out who someone is. So in the, in the security parlance, we have an interesting term that says, you know, “ identity is the new perimeter you have to protect each person individually.” You can't just put someone behind a corporate Network and say they're protected.

The other aspect of it is that identity is fundamental to knowing who that person is. Even when you are transacting with them or you're doing business with them, you want to know who they are. And if you know who they are, you know what their preferences are, and you can give them a better experience. So in some sense identity, a plays, a really important role in the customer experience and the customer relationship management. Very important roles, one in being able to protect people and the other one is also giving them an experience, a good experience.

STACI SATTERWHITE:

Okay. So let us talk a little bit about the cost of poor CX. I think ForgeRock basically did a Forrester study that was published recently, that talked about just the overall the cost of poor CX. Obviously, that's very important to us here at Khoros. You're reading our mail, so to speak. You're speaking our language. I would love to hear a little bit more about that study and kind of how you tied, what ForgeRock does to overall cost savings for businesses, with respect to poor CX.

ATRI CHATTERJEE:

We did some work on this alongside Forrester and really, the way they did the study was we worked with Forester, who are an independent consulting company, a third party, and they worked with our customers, really, people that use the ForgeRock system to try to understand better on, you know what their experiences were. What were some of their challenges? We sort of looked at, you know? Three interesting things that came out of that.

One was, you know, what was the cost of providing people a better experience and how does that manifest itself in benefits if you could provide them a better experience? One of the things that we will all these companies benefit from was when you provided them a better identity management experience and the simplest way of thinking about identity management is the starting with the front door logging in getting into a service as simple as that. That's how you start your journey with the provider, right? With a company, you go to a retail outlet, you log in. That's the first thing you have to do. What's interesting is that this study showed that 40% of all help desk costs were due to the whole forgotten password and password reset process. So, if you think about and, and probably the largest expense that they incurred was their help desk. When they basically improve that they say saw a 40 percent reduction in those help desk costs. So on the average, I think it was about ten dollars of call on a help desk call. That's what it cost. You save 40 percent of that. So, it becomes from $10 and goes down to six dollars. And now, you can only imagine how many millions of calls some of these big organizations have a huge impact.

ANASTACIA DARBY:

You held a webinar on the top customer experience trends for driving customer transfer, digital transformation in 2022. Are there some key highlights from that discussion or some of the top trends that relate to the customer experience that you might want to share today?

ATRI CHATTERJEE:

You know one of the things that this omnichannel capability also provides you is, think about in the access and authentication. We are trying our best to sort of like get to a world where we don't have to have this username and password paradigm. Now, it will take a while to get out of that, but there are a bunch of things that we are doing in our company and in other places to try to get two more passwordless environments.

STACI SATTERWHITE:

Yeah, frictionless, right?

ATRI CHATTERJEE:

Frictionless. The device that you're using now, think about all of us, have now these iPhones and Android phones. And one of the things that those device manufacturers have done is that they have adopted this concept of passwordless into those devices. Those devices now have the ability to store, securely store, these secrets on them, the authenticator secret. So, that once you thumbprint log in to your, or enter your device, or face recognition into your device or even put in a pin code – that device can then be used as one of the authenticators you typically have, you know, you could, you know, we talked about multi-factor authentication– that becomes a factor of the authentication right there, right? And so, you know, we get to the point where we can actually get to a place where we don't have to, like have to remember our passwords because we're logging into our account. We're using this device that has a fingerprint that they already know about. And there's something stored on the device that basically does that back-and-forth transition. And so, there's a bunch of work that's being done in this area that, you know, with these devices now that have this, the capability, the identity and access management systems like ours can facilitate a much more smooth, passwordless environment.

STACI SATTERWHITE:

Atri of this has been amazing. Before we sign off, we'd like to take a few minutes to get to know you. We do this thing here on CX Confessions we call Rapid Fire. So, Anastasia and I are going to ask you a series of Rapid Fire questions just to get to know you and I will start. What was your first concert?

ATRI CHATTERJEE:

I remember that. Well, The Commodores. Do you remember those guys?

STACI SATTERWHITE:

Wow, really?

ATRI CHATTERJEE:

Well, if you do, Lionel Richie was the lead singer of The Commodores.

STACI SATTERWHITE:

Of course, I love the Commodores!

ANASTACIA DARBY:

That’s incredible. What profession, other than your own, would you attempt, if you could?

ATRI CHATTERJEE:

Well, that's also a pretty straightforward question because I have thought about this and particularly as I get older and get ready to do new things. I would like to be a tour guide who takes people to interesting places. I think that would be a lot of fun because you get to research new places. And then you get to really experience these and, hopefully, if you have other interested people with you, it will be a lot of fun.

STACI SATTERWHITE:

What a very cool answer. Uh, wow. I hadn't thought about that, but you're right. It sounds like a cool profession. Okay, next rapid-fire question. What was your first job?

ATRI CHATTERJEE:

My first job was as a dishwasher in the college dining hall.

STACI SATTERWHITE:

It sounds like a great first job. We all need to do that type of labor when we're young to appreciate it.

ATRI CHATTERJEE:

They used to call that the Scully, you know?

STACI SATTERWHITE:

Scully?

ATRI CHATTERJEE:

Yeah, with the big, the big hose and washing down all the plates and all that. It’s good experience. It also gave me a sense of how much food gets wasted which is just a travesty.

STACI SATTERWHITE:

Good point whole other podcast episode on that.

Okay. Next, what's the most inspiring book you have ever read?

ATRI CHATTERJEE:

I have read a lot of great books, but one of them that really stands out is the book called “The Snow Leopard” by naturalist, by the name of Peter Matthiessen. It's a really interesting book because it set, he wrote it in the late 70s, and it was about his journey into the Himalayas looking for the snow leopard. And, but what started off as a journey as a naturalist looking for a particular animal ended up becoming sort of personal and spiritual journey. Really beautifully described in the book and it's just a fantastic read.

STACI SATTERWHITE:

Very cool. I’ll have to check it out. Okay, and then last, if you had to move somewhere other than where you currently live, where would it be?

ATRI CHATTERJEE:

Right. So, I am assuming this question means that you know if I had to live in another place, not just an alternative place, but if I had to move somewhere else. But I would probably like– I live in San Francisco. So, I really enjoy living in the city and I would probably choose another bustling city with activity, food, and culture. I will probably choose between London, Singapore, maybe Mumbai, my hometown. Those would be, I am still very much of an urban person. So, I would choose one of those places.

STACI SATTERWHITE:

Yeah, it's hard to go non-urban when you love the food options, the culture option, the hustle-bustle. The “hair on fire city,” as my husband and I like to say. Having recently just spent some time in London. Yeah. That would be, would be an awesome place to be.

ATRI CHATTERJEE:

Wonderful place. Yeah.

STACI SATTERWHITE:

Well Atri, we have enjoyed this! Anastasia, thank you very much for being my co-host today.

ANASTACIA DARBY:

Anytime. Always happy to.

STACI SATTERWHITE:

Maybe we can do this again. Atri, Anastasia. Thank you so much. Thank you to our listeners for this episode of CX Confessions.

ATRI CHATTERJEE:

Thank you.

STACI SATTERWHITE:

Wow, what a great and interesting conversation with Atri. Having spent some time myself in the digital identity space, it never really made the connection for how important it is to get identity right in order to set up CX. And, more specifically get identity right in a frictionless way so the Holy Grail of, “can we really be sure we know who someone is without asking them any questions” and making it frictionless. And then, making the CX experience specific and pertinent to them. I never really put those two things together before. So that was an interesting concept for me.

Anastasia. What did you think?

ANASTACIA DARBY:

Absolutely. And it got me thinking, too, about the way that, you know, on Strategic Services my team interacts with customers on behalf of our Khoros’ customers. We're often trying to make about frictionless experience across how a customer is interacting on social media and ensuring that our customers, who are engaging with them, have the frictional hand off if they need to talk with an agent. Or you need to have better history and understanding of who this individual is so that you can really individualize that engagement. But then also, you know, from this other side of identity and protection and making sure that you're creating a safe community, you know? Weeding out spam, weeding out bad actors. And I think that is such a holistic experience from social engagement, digital engagement, but also a lot of these offline activities that he talked about as well.

STACI SATTERWHITE:

Absolutely. In fact, you just reminded me, using the term “bad actors” of my days being in this space. We used to have analysts that would spend lots and lots of time on the dark web because, yeah, the stuff actually gets sold. It's really scary. There are bad actors out there. It's terrifying.

ANASTACIA DARBY:

Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's pretty wild, you know? I see it a lot and in a microcosm, on social commentary where you have got spam, you have got fake accounts, and they're things that brands can do to weed those out. But, you know, that's all that's on such a small scale. There are so many other ways that they could be engaging that you really need to look out for is a brand. So, I love what the drop is doing to make that, you know, going back again, more of a frictionless experience for customers.

STACI SATTERWHITE:

Yeah, exactly. And then even independent of the security part, just the whole concept of forgot password that Forrester study was very interesting. Something that's not new, but still all organizations grapple, if you will, with the fact that they spend the majority of their help desk time on forgotten passwords. It's definitely an area where companies invest a lot of time and energy, and not to mention frustration from a user. Yeah. If we can get that part right. Wow, what a better place the world would be.

ANASTACIA DARBY:

Agreed. I know, I don't enjoy that piece of trying to log in to something. So, the more that can be easy to do and I, take less from me, I certainly enjoy that experience.

STACI SATTERWHITE:

Yeah, very good. Totally agree.

Anastasia, this has been lovely. Thank you so much for your time today and our interview with Atri it's been a pleasure doing this with you today.

ANASTACIA DARBY:

Thank you so much for having me.

STACI SATTERWHITE:

Thanks all for listening to this episode of CX Confessions. We will talk to you next time.