Kenshoo is an Israel-based digital marketing platform whose customers range from small agencies representing local businesses to corporate behemoths like Walgreens and Target. Since Kenshoo’s inception in 2006, the company has grown to a behemoth in its own right, generating over $350 billion in annualized revenue per year for its customers.

Kenshoo owes its success to its innovative platform, which is capable of evolving at the speed of a constantly changing industry. As Kenshoo’s System Architect Shlomi Cohen puts it, “agility is something we basically inherited from this industry because everything moves so fast, both on the side of digital media, and on the other side, restrictions that companies and people want about their privacy.”

The company dominates in an industry where speed is everything, but in 2018, Kenshoo noticed its homegrown authentication solution could no longer keep up. “Every now and then, an integration with a new component or external services was needed and it was very cumbersome to set up,” says Cohen. He suggested adopting a third-party authentication solution to keep Kenshoo in the fast lane.

Trying an Auth0 Competitor, With Frustrating Results

Initially, Kenshoo tried replacing its in-house authentication solution with an Auth0 competitor. But Kenshoo soon found that despite the competitor’s lower upfront price tag, its insufficient customizability and responsiveness was costing the company dearly.

“We have some customers that need their logo to be on the login page,” Cohen explains. “But I didn’t like the customization I had with [the competitor]. It was very limited. We had to adjust our expectations and needs to fit their model.”

In addition, Cohen cites slow ticket response times and poor quality answers as “the last straw.” This lack of customer support turned small issues into big problems. “I remember one little thing that was big enough for us to drop this venture,” Cohen says. “The login username was case sensitive, and this breaks us because we can’t change that logic for all our existing customers. I struggled with it for about two weeks and found there was no way around it. So we eventually decided to go to the next vendor on the list and it was Auth0.”

Transitioning from the Auth0 competitor proved to be much less onerous than Kenshoo’s team expected. “To spend two weeks moving from one vendor to another is amazing from my point of view,” Cohen says. “The one thing an organization like us doesn’t like is vendor locking, but migrating to Auth0 was seamless.”

Speeding Integrations From Weeks to Minutes

Prior to using any outside solution, Kenshoo’s biggest challenge with its in-house authentication solution was the time it took to implement new integrations, even with up to five developers maintaining it. “It wasn’t very quick from the point the customer requests an integration until we had the integration up and running,” Cohen recalls.

For example, integrating Kenshoo’s homegrown solution with Zendesk took the team a month and a half, with authentication alone taking two to three weeks. Cohen compares that experience to working with Auth0: “Our customer manager sent me a message one day, asking ‘Did you know that Auth0 has an integration with Zendesk?’ ” Cohen laughed, remembering that "it took us 10 minutes on a Zoom call to set it up." After a week, he replaced all of the authentication components of the Zendesk integrations he'd built from scratch with Auth0.

75% Decrease in Authentication Support Tickets

Thanks to simpler authentication and authorization, Auth0 has lightened the load for Kenshoo’s support team. According to Cohen, the team had struggled with password resets and related issues, so he reached out to Auth0 for advice. “Once I had a ticket opened and I talked with one of the support engineers at Auth0 who showed me the admin dashboard. In 10 minutes I had the solution to reset passwords, block/unblock users, and more without going to a complicated authorization model,” Cohen says. Kenshoo also enabled a Google social login, currently used by 25% of users and growing, to further simplify the login process. Now, authentication-related support desk tickets have dropped from roughly 100 a year to only 25.

In fact, Cohen reports that Auth0 has helped the whole Kenshoo team focus on their goals instead of getting sidetracked by authentication. They’re starting to roll out their public API agenda and focusing more resources on ecommerce. “At least half of the original team that was supposed to be responsible for authentication and authorization within Kenshoo doesn’t work around this area at all. It’s only me, an hour here, an hour there,” says Cohen. “Now we’re free to develop other things.”