Reduce onboarding friction and enroll real customers faster
An enterprise B2B SaaS learning management system (LMS) provider (we’ll call them HyperLearn) wanted to develop a self-service, user friendly authentication experience that allowed their customers to onboard with less friction and less technical interaction.
HyperLearn’s objective was to reduce the technical overhead involved with on-boarding new customers and provide new authentication methods that would make their platform more accessible to new customers in new market segments.
First: Why do anything at all?
Hyperlearn Doesn’t want to waste money solving a problem that doesn’t return on their investment
Reduced on-boarding & support friction for B2B customers
HyperLearn spends between 10 and 20 hours on-boarding new customers. By enabling self-service on-boarding they will help their customer’s realize ROI faster.
Download the Full Reference Architecture
Improved customer experience and increased customer retention
B2B end-users expect a seamless experience when accessing the products they use to be effective at their jobs. HyperLearn wants balance security and friction
Support for advanced & emerging identity needs.
To reach the most potential business customers, HyperLearn needs to support a wide range of identity providers to better support businesses of all sizes, from small teams to large-scale enterprises
Eliminating Barriers to Entry
HyperLearn’s customer on-boarding can get complicated and in some cases requires a lot of technical heavy lifting. This creates an artificial barrier to entry that results in friction and churn before a customer has a chance to onboard to the platform.
Bring Your Own IdP (BYOIdP)
B2B Invitations
Enterprise customers (universities, enterprises) can use their own corporate identity provider to authenticate to the HyperLearn platform. This requires technical know-how that requires several back-and-forth interactions that delays adoption.
HyperLearn currently has to manually add their customer’s extended members which creates administrative overhead and delayed return on investment for their customers
Entitlements & Service Level Tier
User Management
HyperLearn currently has to manually configure entitlements for logical groups of users and needs to promote customers into a service level tier after initial signup
HyperLearn’s user administration overhead is growing and requires backend intervention for common tasks such as password changes & unblocking users
Customer Experience Requirements
Like any SaaS provider, HyperLearn has spent countless cycles architecting their ideal customer on-boarding experience. Beginning with a low commitment free tier, HyperLearn encourages their customers to try their service first before enrolling in premium tiers and subscribing to value added features.
B2B2X Relationships
HyperLearn’s customers expose their service to their own customers (in most cases, students & parents), and as such a single user might belong to multiple logical organizations
Self-Service B2B Invitations
HyperLearn wants to allow their customers to manage their own end user invitations and manage life cycle events on their own.
Role Based Access Controls (RBAC)
HyperLearn wants to provide common roles for customers to support different relationships such as curriculum creators, professors as well as teachers, students & parents.
Workflows & Business Processes
Our architecture strategy focuses on providing consistent user experiences that are common in B2B SaaS organizational business models. These strategies help HyperLearn to maximize efficiency in their two most costly activities: user conversion & B2B on-boarding.
Free Tier Signup
Within the free tier, users are registered using the common Auth0 authorize endpoint. This results in a user profile with no organizational membership and no additional roles or permissions.
While these users initially represent zero realized revenue, over the long term a non-trivial portion of these free tier users convert to paid customers.
B2B Signup
Within the B2B enterprise tiers, users are automatically enrolled as a member of their organization using an invitation. This signup flow enrolls B2B users into RBAC roles.
This strategy allows HyperLearn to enable their customers to self-service their organization’s on-boarding and dramatically reduce the time to adopt.
Extensibility
As new requirements are uncovered, and new business cases are developed, HyperLearn doesn’t want to re-architect their entire identity stack. To future proof this solution, Auth0 post-login Actions are used to enhance the resulting identity and access tokens. This implementation utilizes the Auth0 Actions event & API objects. Additionally, the Auth0 Actions secrets management capability is used to store API keys to facilitate interactions with 3rd party services.
What We Delivered
Project Coordination & Roadmap
We understand the stakeholders that need to be in the room to solve the big-lift problems. We provided a step-by-step roadmap milestones to help coordinate each phase of the project and identify owners for each outcome
Reference Architecture
Technical documentation similar to what you’re reading now … of course, with quite a bit more detail. We outlined edge cases, caveats, and technical guidance on limitations, scalability, disaster recovery and important performance benchmarks
Customer Experience
Extensible HTML, CSS and Javascript to support every aspect of user experience including WCAG 2.0 guidance.
Extensibility
Javascript supporting customization of pre & post authentication logic, including step-up MFA, authentication denial conditions and 3rd party API interactions
CI/CD Integration
Infrastructure and orchestration as code to ensure deployments are repeatable with robust failure recovery and rollback capabilities
Get a free technical discovery
Identity validation isn’t easy. We can help. We’re happy to hop on a call and chat about your use case and give you viable next steps to help you solve your identity, security & fraud problems