How to Improve Customer Experience with Good Data Privacy Practices
5 min read
If you wish to run a modern business effectively, it is essential to collect and manage customer data properly. In the first lines, keep all the collected data safe while offering agencies and companies a thorough insight into what customers may expect from their services and products.
When you manage the collected data accordingly, customer data management can greatly improve data-driven and smart-decision making. It’s no quantum physics – just quick math. The more data collected and processed, the higher their vulnerability of being misused or stolen.
When a breach in customer data occurs, the consequences can reach great lengths. When a company’s data gets stolen, that company may even be facing a collapse. To avoid this, companies and agencies must invest in customer data management, especially because more and more consumers are becoming aware of their rights to privacy of personal data.
Knowing this, your company should minutely work on implementing proper customer data management and be prepared to explore it in detail while also remaining consistent in the whole process. If not, your whole business may be at great risk of going under.
The four most effective practices that have proven effective in enhancing proper customer data management will be listed below.
Make Data Security Your Top Priority
Keeping data deletion or disclosure at a minimum and preventing all unauthorized access to your data is crucial for properly carrying out this strategy. Put yourself in your consumer’s shoes and you will get a hold of just how important it is to be certain that your personal data is stored in a safe place and properly handled.
Next to disrupting the safety of your consumers, breaches in data safety can also cost your company a great deal of cash and can severely harm its reputation. Such harmful side-effects of a data breach can damage your company to a point from which it may not recover. A data protection plan can greatly help you avoid such outcomes.
To implement a data protection plan successfully, you should first understand your data’s lifecycle and decide which of them are sensitive. Next, you should decide who can access which data and inform all your employees about security awareness. Naturally, you should know which sensitive data regulations apply to your company.
It’s also highly advisable that you do regular backups and inventory your data while documenting their processing. When you want to protect particular data, plan and organize the processes. Finally, automate all processes for strong, far-reaching protection.
Organize, Classify and Manage the Storage of Collected Data
Before implementing a customer data management strategy, you should always know exactly which customer data types your company is dealing with. There are usually two types of data that a company can deal with:
- Behavioral data – giving you insight into the actions your customers are performing;
- Identity data – insight into who the customers of your company are;
After realizing what type of data you are dealing with, you should always store them in a safe location. With easy access and insight into all the data, you will enable yourself to enjoy the crucial benefit of data management – ease of access to that information with all the security measures taken.
Determine Which Customer Data Is Critical
Determining which data is critical will help you understand what type of data can be breached easily. Mind you, not all data needs the same levels of protection and management. This understanding will lead you to better data optimization, implementation of security concerns, and good storage cost optimization.
Some consumers may find it very uncomfortable to share too much personal data for your company to collect and store, which is why you have to decide which sets of data to manage. Whichever data-set you opt for, make sure it stays in line with your workflow and overall streamline of your company.
After all, the primary goal of each business is to thrive, so keep your decision-making pointed in that direction.
Don’t Neglect Data Regulations Compliance
Data regulations compliance can’t be approached with great ease and effortlessly nowadays. It’s a bit more complex now since compliance of such sort is taken very seriously by the public. The two inevitable laws and regulations that your company has to comply with are:
- GDPR – General Data Protection Regulation, the primary law which regulates how companies protect data of EU citizens since 2018;
- CCPA – California Consumer Privacy Act, giving consumers more control over the personal data that companies tend to collect about them since 2018;
Whichever you resort to, it is recommended to apply them across all your devices in the company, communication networks, teams, and databases. These new approaches took the data management landscape to a completely different level and changed the way businesses collect consumer data with the necessary permissions.
Regulatory compliances fill in all the regulatory and security gaps and enhance data flow across your business’ networks. Messaging systems and email platforms tend to be the ones harboring the most sensitive data in abundance. To protect them and avoid breaches, most experts urge businesses to develop a data archiving policy.
Email retention policies can greatly help each company to conveniently overcome these vulnerabilities of stored data. Moreover, these regulations are getting more rigorous by the year. Handling such issues at their very core may save you from financial and legal damages that can sometimes be too much to handle with the resources of your company you have at hand.
Remember to never leave any issue unattended regarding customer data management, while always making sure that you comply with all federal laws.
The Wrap Up
As you have just witnessed, investing in a customer data management plan may just as well be the essential step to take if you want your customers to have a good experience. The industry your company belongs to and its overall size is irrelevant; each company should pursue this plan. To grant your company with it, you must place the interests and concerns of your customers first. Bear in mind that being consistent is the key, while also making sure that you stay up to date with your strategy.
Binary Blogger has spent 20 years in the Information Security space currently providing security solutions and evangelism to clients. From early web application programming, system administration, senior management to enterprise consulting I provide practical security analysis and solutions to help companies and individuals figure out HOW to be secure every day.
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