Single Sign-On SSO And Its Importance
Single sign-on commonly abbreviated as SSO is a form of unifying the customer experience by linking different platforms together to share the same credentials and users. For those that may not already know of single sign-on an example could be using your android phone and Gmail accounts to login to your email while also being able to store and upload your photos as well as your music. Google is a great example of a company that has mastered the single sign-on process through streamlining all of their applications through a single user they have achieved a better and more wholesome user experience. In this blog post we will discuss single sign-on and what it may mean to you and your business.
Why do you need SSO?
Many companies these days underestimate the benefit of single sign-on and are simply "okay" with their customers using different points of entry to access different services. The thing with this business process is that it greatly reduces the user experience causing users to become frustrated from dealing with remembering multiple logins and multiple links to different services. A customer can easily become annoyed or they can stop using one of your services altogether.
Benefits of SSO.
1. Improved unification of services and data sharing - This is one of the greatest benefits of single sign-on. This allows one application to essentially talk with another application passing a user's credentials and possibly other information. Through this process you can share certain data variables about a user and have him more qualified throughout your applications. For example payments data such as address and email information does not have to be entered multiple times and custom variables can also be transferred over between applications.
2. Time saved - The process of single sign-on saves the user precious time. Entering in information including sign up information and then login information can lead users to become frustrated with the software and turn away from it. The attention span of the average person is low especially if it’s a non-essential service and anything that can streamline the process is indispensable.
3. Discovery of additional services - This is a benefit that is not often considered. One thing that single sign-on allows you to do is to bind all different services and software's together in one location. For example, if you have a dashboard for the user to login with different services outlined you can show your different product offerings on the same page and users can login straight to the other products without having to register or create a new username. The simplicity of this allows users to quickly login and potentially discover other service offerings that they may not otherwise have known about.Complexity of implementing an SSO though single sign-on is a great tool it does have its complications. When implementing it you have to take into consideration that an integration must be built between all applications and at certain times if there is a third-party application sending the data you will have to deal with the tech department of the company continuously making sure that the data their SSO is sending is correct. Creating SSO often involves the company to deal with many different APIs and integrations giving a bit of a paradox, though complexity is greatly reduced for the user, it’s greatly increased for the developer at the back end.Final Thoughts.
Overall as we move towards companies trying to be more user-friendly, the prevalence of the SSO is growing and more companies are striving to unify the customer experience. Though it may be hard to initially implement the benefits of having and SSO are very high.
