Businesses in today’s age are accelerating their digital transformation because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Surina Shukri, chief executive officer of Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC), said the digital transformation efforts are still happening in many industries, especially the small and medium enterprises across the Asia-Pacific region. They are focusing on the digitalization of products, services, and business processes.
However, even before the pandemic hit and affected the economy, some enterprises have digitalized their processes. For the past two years, spearheaded by NE Digital, NTUC Enterprise has gone through a broad digital transformation.
To understand their customers better, NE Digital saw the supermarket company’s customers had separate accounts for each service. It’s causing them to have data silos and detracting from the user experience. Also, it prevented the team to create a single, holistic view of their customers.
Moving Separate Accounts Into A Single Platform
Winson Lim, Vice President of Core Product Development at NE Digital, described the push for data consolidation in terms of customer experience. “If I’m a customer, I might have an account with NTUC FairPrice, one with NTUC First Campus, and another one with NTUC Income,” Winson said. “And even if I just need to change my address, I would need to have multiple contact points to update my profile. We also realized that we don’t have a single location to find out that someone is a very valuable customer for NTUC Enterprise, and we want to treat them like a VIP.”
“Rather than doing a one-time migration where there are a lot of edge cases we have to handle, we migrate user-by-user,” Winson explained. “When the user is trying to log in or sign up, we migrate their data to Auth0 automatically.”
Winson highlighted that customers have appreciated the change with their platform as signing up is a faster experience. He further added, “ Customers also like that they are stayed logged in, as we followed identity standards to ensure compatibility with other interfaces within our applications.”
Protecting Customers’ Personal Data
NTUC Enterprise wanted to take advantage of cloud features to unite their workforce and customers but had to abide by Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA). This law makes it difficult to store the personal data of Singapore’s residents in public cloud servers outside the country. The solution was Auth0’s, Private Cloud.
“We host the Private Cloud instance within the Singapore region to oblige to the Transfer Limitation of customer data according to the Personal Data Protection Commission (PDPC). The administrators/users are kept separated and only within our Private Cloud – we have visibility to even Auth0’s staff access into the Private Cloud instance for maintenance purposes.”
Auth0’s Private Cloud deployments are single-subscriber, isolated instances where none of a customer’s resources (software and infrastructure) are shared with any other tenants. This offers increased performance, stability, availability, and control.
