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Case study

No smoke without single sign-on: International retail business improves UX with Azure AD B2C

An improved and secure CRM with a slick customer sign-on experience, all courtesy of Microsoft’s Azure AD B2C.

E-cigarettes (“vaping”) represent an increasingly popular way of reducing dependence on cigarettes – a process that comes with health and financial benefits for customers.

Our client (who wishes to remain anonymous), a market-leading e-cigarette brand in several countries, conducts much of its business online. Their website offers a way for consumers to interact with the brand, including responding to and benefiting from promotions. This requires a modern and sophisticated solution to ensure a great user experience (UX).

As part of a broader project, our client wanted to standardise and improve both CRM and single sign-on (SSO) for several websites and brands across different markets. They also wanted to improve the security and reliability of the SSO solution and to streamline centralised IT support, thus making significant cost savings.

Kocho worked with our client to deploy the Azure AD B2C solution globally to secure the authentication processes and enable smooth integration with several different CRM/website platforms.

Results

Global brand consistency across different platforms and markets.
Secure and trusted single sign-on and authentication procedures.
Smooth integration with multiple website platforms.
A customised yet highly scalable customer login experience.
A standardised global CRM solution saving IT time and resources.

Kocho helped us get through some challenging hurdles in terms of technology and deadlines, we are very pleased with the success of the project.

Client’s Global Digital Consultant

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A lack of login standardisation and identification credentials between websites

Our client’s Swiss website is available only to Swiss consumers and requires proof of age before a user can access the content. It is, of course, important for existing users to be able to identify themselves for their second and subsequent visits without going through age verification, and so a login function is required.

As part of a broader project, the client wanted to standardise both CRM and single sign-on (SSO) across several websites and brands across different markets.

Before this project, there was little standardisation between the different websites in terms of login methods and credential stores, making it difficult to streamline centralised support.

The move was also designed to have the benefit of improving the security and reliability of the SSO solution.

A single sign-on solution built with Microsoft’s Azure AD B2C

Microsoft’s Azure AD B2C was chosen as a SSO solution. B2C is an authentication platform providing many significant advantages, including a highly available distributed infrastructure, industrial-scale security on tap, and support for modern, open standards, which meant that it could support a diverse range of website platforms across the client’s main and related brands.

Website technologies included Magento, Drupal and .Net. All these platforms needed to be integrated into the SSO solution.

A Kocho B2C architect spoke with the client about their authentication requirements and offered the appropriate guidance and support for their B2C design, before bringing colleagues in to work on:

B2C integrations for all the required platforms
B2C user flows for sign-up, sign-in, and password recovery
User migration from existing systems

We also worked with other suppliers who developed the templates for a custom look and feel.

Our solution has now been deployed into production across four websites in two markets, and we continue to work with the client toward additional deployments.