What Do Hair Salons Have To Do With CIAM?
Heya,
I was talking to someone at a conference a few weeks ago about the value of customer identity and access management (CIAM). After I explained I worked on ‘login systems’ and was met with a quizzical look, I talked through a use case that I thought explained the benefits in more details.
I thought I'd share a slightly longer version of it with you.
Hair Salons
Imagine you are president and owner of a chain of hair salons. Naturally, you want to optimize the number of customers your employees or contractors can see in each hair salon. This helps you defray the fixed costs of marketing and rent over as many customers as possible.
One way to help increase efficiencies is to make sure that your employees are always cutting hair. Taking reservations and letting potential customers know about wait times is one way to do that. Exposing this information is a win-win; employees know when folks are coming in. Customers know when the local salon is busy and can pick a different time.
You can offer this information via the phone, but that requires someone to answer the phone at the salon. That can either be a hair stylist, who is taking time away from their customer, or a receptionist, who will cost money. You can also have an IVR system, but that may frustrate some users.
What About A Web App?
Another alternative is to let customers make a reservation using a web application. Because this app deals with individual users and their reservation at a certain location and time, it will have to have some kind of user authentication system. The system will have following characteristics:
It will have to be able to know the customer is real, preferably by verifying their email address or phone number.
It will have to let customers login with just the identifier, using a magic link or code.
It has a relatively simple authorization model--almost all the customers will have limited permissions and be able to take only limited actions.
It will need to scale to as many users as your hair salon chain wants to serve, which is a lot.
bonus request! It'd be great if the system could store information about the customer, such as the details about their last hair cut. This could be displayed when the customer entered the salon so that the stylist could offer the same cut.
These are all are relatively vanilla CIAM features. They are common across industries with customers who are humans. This is in contrast to customers who are businesses or representatives of businesses.
There are other parts of the hair salon web application, of course. Other functionality which is critical to the customer experience includes:
actually making a reservation
adding new stores
admin facing functionality like controlling a store's open hours and capacity
calculating and displaying the wait time
These features are business logic. They may be particular to your chain of salons, or they may apply to all hair salons, or maybe even generalize to other service businesses like eyeglass stores, but they are unlikely to be generally applicable to all stores.
CIAM Integrations
These are the two critical pieces of any CIAM integration:
the business application which relies interacting with authenticated customers, but has all the functionality that the customer actually cares about
the vanilla CIAM logic which can be outsourced to a library or auth server
The former is more important than the latter for the customer and the business. It’s what is unique and what the customer wants access too. However, a secure implementation of the latter is important for the safety and security of the former.
This hypothetical hair salon application lets the customer log in. They can then choose their location, see the wait time and make a reservation. Or not, if the wait time is too long.
When the customer arrives, the stylist can know about their previous haircuts and any other relevant information. This allows for scalable personal service.
Using such a system, the hair salon is more efficient, the stylist is more prepared, and the customer is happier.
This is the enabling power of CIAM. By integrating with custom business applications, a CIAM system enables secure, scalable self-service interactions with customers. It can even enable new services like mass personalization, as illustrated by the “last hair cut detail” functionality mentioned above.
Do you have a favorite use case or application that shows the power of CIAM? Would love to hear about it.
Dan