Abstract

The Customer Experience (CX) ideology has continued to dominate the pages of marketing strategies across varying organizations and industries. Creating and maintaining a strong customer following has become synonymous with business success. Vendors attempt to drive customer loyalty and profit retention by offering an omni-channel, media-rich experience. At every turn, the digital world attempts to lure customers with gamified widgets, rewards programs and personalized software services. One less considered interaction affecting the CX journey, online security, has been somewhat ignored, assumed, or even, taken for granted in cases. The unfortunate side to this equation is that this can have catastrophic effects on the customer-and their experience. The purpose of this research is to understand if it’s possible to deliver the same level of CX inside a high-security environment, as inside a low or medium security environment, using cloud-hosted software as a service (SaaS) as a basis for this study. By using textmining techniques, data collection and testing a defined use case, we ascertained that security has an impact on CX in cloud-hosted software services. As a result of this research we have identified techniques for creating inclusive, security-conscious SaaS environments with the overall goal of maximizing audience participation.

Keywords: Information systems; Information security; Cyber security; Access control; Cloud services; Corporate data; IT industry