The challenge is to provide expanded access to corporate and customer data and do it securely. To answer that question, check out what to look for in such products and the security implications involved in deploying them. You need something flexible enough to allow the level of personalization that gets and keeps customers. Simply giving users a choice of colors, layouts, fonts and features makes a huge amount of difference. Everyone and everything that interacts with your systems is a customer to whom you have an opportunity to provide customer service.
Many customers resent having to remember and juggle multiple user IDs and passwords.
Neither is good for security. Many companies are looking to single sign-on to solve this problem. The user authenticates once and that authentication is used for multiple systems. You can argue that single sign-on represents a single point of failure, but a robust implementation will minimize the risk. Furthermore, if users only have to remember one user ID and one password, it's a far easier task to get them to select strong, difficult to guess passwords, ones that are less likely to appear taped to keyboards.