Beyond the new data privacy regulations: how to improve customer understanding and the customer experience?

When it comes to state-of-the-art sales and marketing, customer experience (CX) is a highly important topic. Creating and analyzing outstanding customer journeys while considering attractive and suitable marketing touchpoints are seen as key to success when it comes to omnichannel marketing.

The customer experience depends on many factors, all of which have to be considered in terms of strategic and operational marketing. A key topic is the individualization of various marketing touchpoints. Individual content, recommendations, user interfaces, and product offers can lead to a win-win situation: resulting in improved customer satisfaction and marketing success.

Artificial intelligence is a recent megatrend facilitating the customer experience—enabling advanced profiling, predictions, and continuous improvements to be made. The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) is opening the door to consumer’s living rooms, enabling “everywhere marketing.”

But what about privacy? Undoubtedly, data protection must be part of the story—whether you like it or not. Individual customer journeys depend on the processing of personally identifiable information (PII), which is restricted by regulations in various countries, such as GDPR.

Anyway, complying with the relevant legislation is mandatory. Creating outstanding customer experience while balancing privacy and marketing is a challenge.

Consumers are well aware of the issue of privacy, e.g., due to the latest news about social network data leaks. Furthermore, new technologies, such as AI and IoT, are seen as critical points of concern by many consumers as they are not yet fully aware of the consequences of how these handle their privacy.

Nevertheless, as long as customers are convinced that their data is in safe hands and they see an added value of providing it, they will give consent to process their PII. Transparency and customer understanding are thus essential in this context; this can be achieved e.g., by providing context-oriented information in addition to mandatory privacy policies, or by providing easily configurable privacy centers.

In the end, it can even be a marketing opportunity to convince consumers and customers to provide PII on the basis that your company has not only a high reputation related to its core business but also if it is seen as a champion of privacy as well. This can lead to sustainable trust—a typical marketing goal.

KuppingerCole provides extensive research and advisory helping privacy and marketing stakeholders to combine the best of their two worlds.

Our research documents give insights into many topics to be considered and balanced when it comes to creating trustful customer experiences, such as marketing automation, consumer identity management, artificial intelligence, privacy, security, governance.

We would be pleased to welcome you to experience a customer journey with KuppingerCole—offering many fresh insights in terms of data privacy and CX.