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4 Steps to Customer Data Privacy
Personalization is key to delivering engaging experiences, but recent high-profile privacy abuses have made customers wary of how companies are using their personal information. They are increasingly reluctant to provide their data and increasingly worried about what’s being shared without their knowledge. These attitudes are reflected in the diverse geographic, industry and corporate privacy regulations that you need to take seriously.
Follow these four steps to prove yourself a trustworthy partner to your customers and protect yourself from the penalties of regulatory violations.
Create a unified view of your customers
The first step toward protecting the privacy of customer data is to have it all in one place. This includes basic information such as name and email address, sensitive information such as credit card numbers, unstructured data like purchase history, as well as critical consent permissions. Migrating or synchronizing all of this into one secure customer profile gives you customer insights that enable consistent cross-channel personalization, and it makes it much easier to protect and control all of your customers’ critical data.
Collect and enforce customer consent
Many regulations, such as CCPA and GDPR, have directives that require you to collect consent, with hefty fines for violations. That means collecting attributes that indicate which applications customers have agreed to share their data with. Develop user-friendly interfaces to allow customers to see who has access to their data and manage which attributes they’ve consented to share. Providing this type of insight and control—and faithfully enforcing it, no matter where customers’ data is stored—will reassure them that you’re being a good steward of their data.
Enforce fine-grained data access governance
Beyond saying either "yes" or "no" to an application when it requests access to a customer profile, you also need to control access to specific attributes. For example, a third-party marketing service may need API access to customer names, email addresses and opt-in preferences, but not transaction history. Customers may also want to restrict sensitive attributes from being shared with certain partner apps. Fine-grained data governance will ensure that you can enforce customers’ consent decisions.
Create centralized policies
Meeting privacy regulations is nearly impossible when you're trying to enforce those rules on an app-by-app basis, especially when the regulatory environment is in a constant state of flux. Centralized policies allow you to apply the same data access governance rules to all applications, so you can more easily stay up to date with the latest regulations (and demands from your customers). Application teams can request data the same way they always have, but only receive data and attributes that are compliant with regulations and customer consent decisions.
Customer IAM solutions can help you confidently leverage customer data to deliver personalized experiences while adhering to privacy regulations and maintaining customer trust. To learn more, read Getting Customer IAM Right.
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