Progressive enrollment

When companies want more data about their customers, they generally ask for details when customers first sign up for their application. However, asking for detailed information during a first interaction creates high friction and drop-off rates. Customers are wary of sharing personal information. Before adding account information to their profile, they need to build a trust relationship with a new website or application.

With support for progressively building user profiles built into the Okta authentication process, companies can use profile enrollment policies to create custom forms for their sign-in flows. They can collect profile data incrementally as end users engage with the application.

Information is requested only when relevant to the end user’s activities. These new details are validated during the sign-in process to ensure that accurate information is added to the end user's Okta Universal Directory profile.

You can also integrate inline hooks into the sign-in process to trigger custom code interactions between Okta and your application. See Inline hooks.

In a progressive enrollment scenario, existing registered end users can sign in using established credentials. Okta then evaluates the end user against the Authentication policies in place or, if applicable, the Global Session Policy. See Authentication policies and Global session policies.

Okta evaluates the profile enrollment policy every time the end user attempts to sign in to an app. If you add required attributes to the enrollment form, Okta prompts the end user for this information during their next sign-in attempt. If an end user is already signed in when you change the policy, they can be prompted for more data or assigned to a new group at their next sign-in attempt.

Related topics

Create a profile enrollment policy

Collect profile information and register users

Self-Service Registration

Sign-in flows

End user sign-in process