BY: Kevin Simpson | Senior Business Coach @ Action Edge Business Coaching

Every person, working for every company, or buying from any online website has experienced it. That feeling where you scan your own memory bank, your keystrokes getting louder and harder with every try, your palms getting sweaty.  You questioning your mental fortitude.

That growing anger that results in you yelling at your computer that all too familiar phrase – I’m sure that is my password damn it!!!!

As the number of our personal online accounts increases (North American statistics have that averaging 130 for every one of us) the number of passwords we are forced to create and then recall every day increases too.  The advent of masked passwords (your text being hidden by an *) was supposed to increase the security of our choices, but in the end has actually lead to a decrease in security and a massive decrease in employee productivity for a number of reasons:

  1. The chances of a person mistyping their password choice increases, causing them to choose simpler passwords without special characters, capitalized letters, and rarely used words.
  2. The chance of a user picking a password that has easily guessable references (birthdate, last name, year, team name matching their Facebook avatar of their favorite football team etc.) drastically increases
  3. The constant resetting of passwords by IT departments is costing companies millions of dollars per year in lost productivity driven by the enormous amount of password reset requests

 

More and more companies are re-evaluating their company’s password rules, and for some, as shown in the infographic below, they are actually increasing on-line sales conversion by making it easier for their customers to buy from them.