Ever had to deal with an escalation while the project owner or SPOC is out on vacation?
Getting in touch and getting access can be a HUGE headache! Which is why impersonation is such a powerful tool for growing companies that have clients and sensitive customers..
What is Impersonation?
Impersonation is a functionality that allows authorized users, such as customer support agents or administrators, to temporarily assume the identity and access privileges of another user.
Also known as role delegation, this feature helps managers and companies keep delivery on track.
This allows them to view the system or application from the user's perspective, diagnose issues, and perform actions on their behalf. And it does all this, while making sure there is an active record of which users made these changes.
How Does Impersonation Resolve Critical Issues When a Customer Support Person is Unavailable
1. Maintain Service Continuity
When a customer support person is unavailable, impersonation allows other authorized personnel to step in and address critical issues, making sure that customer requests are resolved promptly and service continuity is maintained.
When handling specific clients, there may be immediate needs and changes to be made. Role delegation or impersonation helps keep client communication active and stakeholders notified even when specific employees are unavailable.
This can be especially valuable in the healthcare, banking, and government sectors where documentation and time sensitivity can play a huge role.
2. Prevents Escalations
By enabling timely resolution of issues, impersonation can prevent escalation and minimize the impact on customer satisfaction. This can be particularly important for critical issues that may require immediate attention.
Quite often escalations occur due to very preventable events. In cases where issues can be resolved quickly, impersonation or role delegation prevents major escalations by making sure issues get resolved and bugs fixed promptly.
3. Enhance Customer Experience
Impersonation can improve the customer experience by enabling faster resolution of issues and reducing the need for customers to repeat their concerns to multiple support agents. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
For customers, they need to feel like problems are being resolved as soon as possible. A lot of the time, absence of a specific stakeholder can cause a communication gap, leading to poor customer experience. However, with impersonation you remove this entirely.
4. Keeps Delivery on Track
When a key team member is unavailable, impersonation allows others to step in and complete their tasks, ensuring that project deadlines are met and deliveries stay on track.
This can be crucial for time-sensitive projects where delays could have significant consequences. By enabling seamless continuity of work, impersonation helps maintain productivity and prevents disruptions that could impact delivery schedules.
This goes especially during instances where major stakeholders are out sick, have to take emergency absence, or are no longer available on office premises.
What to Consider When Adding Impersonation to Your System
1. Principle of Least Privilege
Impersonation should be implemented with the principle of least privilege in mind, granting only the necessary access privileges to authorized personnel. In terms of role delegation or impersonation, this means you assign impersonation only based on absolute requirements.
Aside from this, you also need to limit the number of individuals who can delegate admin access to users to minimize the risk of unauthorized access or misuse of impersonation.
2. Access Control
Access control mechanisms should be in place to restrict impersonation capabilities to authorized personnel and ensure that impersonation sessions are properly monitored and audited.
While access control makes sure that there is secure access and your data complies it can be a hindrance in situations where other users need to access important files. In this case, you can grant users limited time access to privileged features using impersonation or role delegation.
3. Legal Compliance
Impersonation functionality should be implemented in compliance with relevant legal and regulatory requirements, such as data privacy regulations and industry-specific guidelines.
If you are running a company with access to personal information of clients or payment details for complaints, measures are in place when granting temporary access rule delegation and impersonation, to give you auditable records.
This means you can indicate specific instances where individuals had access or made changes to the files with a clear record.
4. Session Management
Proper session management practices should be implemented to ensure that impersonation sessions are securely initiated, terminated, and tracked. This helps prevent unauthorized access and maintains an audit trail of impersonation activities.
Most CIAM or access control software comes with granular session management features and protocols that prevent any unwarranted changes and keep an active idea of who had access.
5. Auditing Requirements
Impersonation activities should be logged and audited to ensure accountability and compliance with regulatory requirements. Audit logs should capture relevant information, such as the impersonator's identity, the impersonated user's identity, the actions performed during the impersonation session, and the duration of the session.
While sharing your credentials is a temporary fix for granting access. With impersonation or role delegation you stay on the right side of HIPPA, GDPR, and CCPA for better CIAM compliance.
6. Data Protection and Integrity
Impersonation functionality should be designed to protect the integrity and confidentiality of customer data. Access to sensitive data should be restricted, and impersonation sessions should be securely managed to prevent unauthorized access or modification of data.
In the case of supply chain systems, financial records, medical records, and other sensitive information, the integrity of your information is pivotal. To make sure that the right users have access and your data is not compromised, impersonation gives you a record of who made changes last even with another user's credentials.
7. Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication
Adaptive multi-factor authentication can be used to enhance the security of impersonation sessions by requiring additional authentication factors based on the risk level of the impersonation activity.
When granting access to users in the case of impersonation, putting an MFA or adaptive MFA framework in place can make sure that this feature is not exploited and is only used in specific circumstances with proper consent from authorised individuals.
This helps make sure that unauthorized access is prevented and allows only authorized personnel to impersonate users.
Using Impersonation in Infisign
With an CIAM software like Infisign UniFed you get a zero-trust based access solution.
But what you also get is the ability to grant users access to sensitive information that is completely in compliance with privacy laws due to an auditable record of changes made by users.
Aside from this, Infisign comes with features like:
- Universal Single Sign-On: With universal single sign-on, Infisign allows you to log in to your full-tech stack in one go using passwordless authentication and even MFA for added security.
- ABAC and RBAC: With attribute-based access control and role-based access control, Infisign allows you to grant and revoke access to groups of people using attributes (like DOJ, branch, or department) or their specific roles. With this you add and remove hundreds of users with just a few clicks.
- AI Assist: With AI Assist, you assist your tenants using AI and chatbots put in place. With this, your support team can address issues quicker and it also makes it easier for tenants to request help when they require assistance or clarification immediately.
- User Lifecycle Management: With directory sync and access policies, user lifecycle management becomes a lot easier without the need for admins to add and remove users from hundreds of apps manually.
- Adaptive MFA: With Adaptive MFA you get MFA that responds based on risk level, like IP used, device health, or even geo-location. After this you have MFA using OTPs, magic links, QR codes and even biometrics.
Try Infisign for Easy to Use Access Management
Moreover, it also does this for non-SSO compatible ecosystems making it a user-friendly application for both workplaces and customer-facing platforms.
Aside from this, we also have 6000+ API and SDK integrations making it a flexible option to work with.
Want to know about this? Reach out for a free demo.
