Privacy and Customer Experience: Showing your Customer you Care

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Privacy and Customer Experience: Showing your Customer you Care

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4 min Read Read   |  Published: Thu Nov 12 2020
Businesses have had, until recently, little motivation to truly put Privacy strategies at the core of their customer experiences. Although many businesses today say they care about our privacy, it’s often difficult to find clear evidence of this in their actions towards users and customers. For some businesses, it can often feel like Privacy is just another PR plug – and yet the significant budget spent on promoting the issue of Privacy is surely testament to how important businesses know these issues to be among their customer base, and how they can be used as competitive differentiators. And so, if businesses are sincere in their approach, why is it so hard to remember the last time you were truly surprised at how transparent and helpful a company was being when it came to the management of your Privacy rights? And why, when we are told that our data is being protected and our rights upheld, do we continue to feel that companies are in fact exploiting our data, and processing our personal information in ways that upset and harm us?
Below we consider a simple way in which businesses can make data privacy a key component in their user experience. Adopting a more transparent Privacy process needn’t be as scary as it sounds.

Let’s quickly settle the debate

Privacy as a user experience is not something that many businesses have historically been particularly convinced about. Many might well admit that it scares them. A typical school of thought is that any increase to the levels of transparency or control afforded to customers would put increased strain on manual and operational resources and would require further investment in data discovery, all while driving increased scrutiny of processes, elevated numbers of Data Subject Access Requests and more opportunities to fail. With the first GDPR-related fines lower than initially feared – indeed some much lower than expected – it’s understandable as to why companies may be seen to have kicked the proverbial can down the road with respect to Privacy. However, expectations among consumers are not slowing, and businesses must find ways of addressing this change.

If it can be said that relevance equals revenue in marketing, then businesses should apply the same logic to Privacy – after all, the two are often very closely linked. Businesses increasingly seek to offer greater personalisation and relevance of products and services, knowing full well that customers are more likely to spend with businesses that do so. Privacy is inextricably tied to the customer experience, and represents an opportunity to demonstrate to customers your respect and understanding of them (and in this case, their data), using a logical and seamless experience to positively impact engagement, all while meeting your regulatory requirements. If so many of the best services are designed with UX at their core, why should Privacy be any different?

A great example of this with respect to Privacy is to have a dedicated Privacy Portal through which customers can manage their consents and permissions, and feel comfortable exercising their rights, should they wish to do so. From a UX perspective, this portal should be relevant and personal to them – it should hold their active consents and permissions, and contain information about their own data, allowing them to make clear and specific Data Rights requests – and if possible, all from a single screen.

Regulation as the Framework for Personalised Privacy

Global Privacy regulations give businesses the framework around which to work. If we take the GDPR as an example, the regulation states that information on processing (including the purpose of processing and legal bases for processing) should be made available to customers (Article 13) and confirmation of data being processing at any time should also be available (Article 15). The logical step here would be to provide a Privacy Portal that automatically populates this information based on the data you hold on your customer. This may sound scary to a business (How do I automate that process? How do I even know what data I truly hold on an individual? Do I know my legitimate reasons for using their data?). And yet, this is not only possible but can in fact be achieved out-of-box with Trunomi’s own Privacy Portal today. Crucially, this example of ‘Privacy as an Experience’ can be achieved without the need to change existing touchpoints, data rails, systems or processes – it can be seamlessly integrated into your existing architecture

You don’t need personal data to build a personal Privacy User Experience

There is no better way of building strong, long-term trusted relationships than by being open, transparent, and by giving customers control over their Consents and Permissions. Businesses that adopt this approach gain a competitive advantage. Once connected with Trunomi, you too can instantly benefit from a purpose-built Privacy Portal for all customers within a matter of hours. Trunomi’s off-the-shelf Privacy Portal can be embedded into any digital touchpoint – e.g website or mobile application, and is fully white-labelable so as to meet brand requirements and ensure a consistent look and feel. If your business already has a Portal, you can simply ingest the data via our simple APIs. All without Trunomi ever needing to touch or store your personal data.

If you want to learn more about how Trunomi’s Privacy Portal can help improve customer engagement and experiences, request a demo today at [email protected].