What if you came to work one fine day to see half of your customer base has left you for your competitors?
If you’ve felt chills running down your body thinking about your revenue and profits.. Good. That’s what you put at stake when you ignore customer privacy.
According to Gartner, privacy will become a reason for your customers to purchase a product or service sooner or later. Data and customer privacy will disrupt every industry, just like ‘organic,’ ‘cruelty-free,’ and ‘free-trade’ labels did a few years ago.
As digital customers crave more data privacy and transparency, it’s the right time to create data practices that eventually become a core differentiator for your company.
In this article, we list some of the best practices for ensuring customer privacy and satisfaction and why you should care as much about privacy as your customers do.
9 Best practices for ensuring customer privacy and satisfaction.
These nine best practices keep your customer privacy at the center stage:
Focus on penetration testing
The number of hackers trying to access your system growing every day, so cybersecurity or penetration testing is necessary. Penetration or pen testing is a simulation of a cyberattack against your network, web application, and computer systems to identify potential vulnerabilities. In pen testing, the tester attempts numerous breaches on your application programming interface and front-end and back-end servers to identify issues traditional security tools cannot.
The point of pen testing is identifying vulnerabilities before a hacker does. As it’s not a one-time affair, most companies conduct these types of pen testing to assess risk and eliminate vulnerabilities:
Network penetration testing
External penetration testing
Internal penetration testing
Web application penetration testing
Cloud penetration testing
Automated penetration testing
Red teaming
Conducting regular pen testing results in:
Quick identification and rectification of security problems.
Reduces the number of instances of costly data breaches.
Builds and maintains customer trust, resulting in customer satisfaction.
Spend time on user preference management
Many customers today are suspicious about how you use their data. While these feelings are bound to crop in, it’s time to reciprocate and show you’re just as concerned as they are.
Respecting your customer’s privacy while driving opt-ins and delivering personalized experiences is challenging. But that’s the harsh reality.
Rather than fretting over the numerous privacy laws, it’s time to buckle up your shoes and create marketing strategies around your customer’s preferred choices.
That’s where user preference management solution jumps in.
Apart from helping you comply with data privacy laws, a user preference management solution ensures you fully use your customers’ preferences.
But what are these preference management solutions?
A user preference management solution collects, stores, and shares user preference-related information with you. It focuses on information a customer wants your company to have.
The data obtained by these tools is a goldmine. With this data, it becomes easier to understand your customer and ensures proper segmentation across various marketing campaigns and initiatives. A preference management solution can ask for and store these user preferences:
Ask whether they want to receive weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly emails.
Ask about their favorite type of product. (a clothing brand asks whether they prefer business, sports, or casual wear).
The type of marketing material they wish to receive.
Here are the benefits of preference management solutions:
Enhances user experience.
Builds trust and customer satisfaction.
Ensures compliance with data privacy laws.
Conduct a data privacy audit
Conducting a data privacy audit helps you understand what data your business needs and what data you’re collecting. Having knowledge of how you store and use data is imperative, especially with the data privacy sword hanging around almost every business.
In a quest to know your customers, you often collect more data than you realize. This can be because you’re using a third-party code or your advertising or analytics agency pulls out customer information.
Either way, you’re being unjust to your customers. Lack of attention to what data you’re collecting can prove detrimental to your business. However, many businesses struggle to keep pace with the data collected, lowering customer satisfaction.
Avoid this trouble by hiring a chief data privacy officer or a chief data officer responsible for managing and ensuring data privacy.
Don’t overlook the physical site
As most transactions and conversations happen over the cloud, many companies focus on building robust digital security.
It may sound weird, but investing in security measures on your business’s physical premises is equally important. Why?
While many businesses don’t maintain a physical copy of customer’s data, thieves steal your company’s laptops and other electronic devices. As a result, they gain access to the digital data you were so dearly trying to protect.
To ensure customer privacy, secure all access points for customer data, such as smartphones, USBs, and laptops. Ensure all your employees use a strong password to prevent unsolicited access to critical customer information.
If you follow the old-school methodology of keeping hard copies of all your customer’s information, shred these documents as soon as you don’t need them.
Additionally, if you use on-site servers, ensure only a few employees access it.
Overlooking the physical side of customer privacy lowers customer satisfaction because all your online security efforts go in vain if someone attacks your physical premises to steal your data.
Ensure secure login and focus on fraud prevention
Secure authentication is a must-have, but often, passwords are the weakest links in the security infrastructure. Using various other risk signals and passwordless authentication helps you provide a secure atmosphere to customers. Because of this, the reliance on reused and overly compromised passwords decreases, reducing the risk of cyberattacks.
When you provide customers with frictionless access to your apps, it builds a sense of trust.
Another reason secure login is essential is that it prevents bad actors from gaining access.
Using various fraud prevention techniques, you monitor user behavior and device signals throughout a particular customer’s session, evaluate any potential risk, and automatically reduce fraud in real time.
Provide customers with an opt-out option
To improve customer satisfaction and ensure data privacy, don’t forget to provide opt-out options for customers.
Giving customers an opt-out option serves two purposes, first, they have control over their personal information. Second, they decide the type of data collected and the data monitoring level they need.
Most customers prefer to opt out of third-party tracking or certain marketing campaigns. Giving customers control over their data privacy instills confidence in your brand. It helps you become a customer-centric brand.
Make employees a part of the security culture
The success of any customer privacy protection depends upon the defensive mechanism employed. To make your employees a part of the security culture, train them on the best practices for data handling. Teach them different ways to protect against cybersecurity attacks.
Train your employees about potential phishing attacks and methods used by hackers to access your systems and networks. Even tell them ways to detect security threats in real time.
This helps you control the damage before an actual data breach occurs.
Besides conducting security training sessions, implement stringent disciplinary action against employees who disclose customer information or data to unauthorized persons.
With human errors accounting for 52% of the root cause of security breaches, providing comprehensive data privacy and security training is necessary.
Protect against phishing attacks
Implement email spam filters throughout your company to reduce the risk of loss due to potential phishing attacks. Regularly update all devices and systems with anti-malware and anti-virus software. It keeps the latest security threats and vulnerabilities at bay.
When you continually protect data, you automatically reduce phishing attacks. Also, encourage employees to report any phishing attacks or email scams. Staying proactive and building the same culture in your company goes a long way in protecting customers’ privacy.
Build a comprehensive data protection infrastructure
Lastly, build a comprehensive data-protecting infrastructure to avoid falling into the trap of data and security breaches. Ensure your company is equipped with:
Strong anti-virus and anti-malware software
Next-generation firewalls
Pop-up blockers
Password managers
Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
Vulnerability scanner
A dedicated budget for your data and security needs helps you prevent malware from attacking your systems and networks.
Invest in customer privacy
Failing to meet customer privacy is a costly mistake. It jeopardizes your business and negatively impacts your bottom line. With cyberattacks happening every 39 seconds, investing in robust and up-to-date solutions wherever necessary is the key to success.
While customer privacy may seem complex initially, it isn’t if you understand its nuances. Always remember that the best protection against any attack is defense. You build a robust defense mechanism by using these nine best practices.
These best practices will pay off by reducing the risk of financial losses and mending customer relationships.
Author’s bio (if needed):
Priya Jain has been copywriting professionally for over nine years. She has attained an engineering degree and an MBA. She teaches math, spends her time running behind her toddler, and tries new recipes while she isn’t writing. You can find her on LinkedIn.
