How the GDPR Can Help Businesses Improve Customer Relationships
Imagine it’s July 2018. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is fully enforced, and thanks to the new regulation, your business is beating the competition by making your customers happier than ever. How did that happen?
Typically, the GDPR is considered a burden imposed upon companies in the EU as well as those with an EU presence. Compliance is indeed a considerable challenge for every organization that handles personal data, but that is not the entire story.
It’s encouraging to look at the implications of GDPR as a business opportunity. This way, your scope will not be limited to viewing efforts simply as a pile of tasks that must be completed in order to fully comply. Rather, with each step in the compliance process, you might instead keep the customer as your focal point: How can I improve the customer experience through the things that we do as a business?
1. Empower and build trust
Currently, you may still have a less than perfect way of informing your customers about how you collect, handle, and store their personal data. Under GDPR, you are required to ask for explicit explicit consent, clarify how you use individual customer data, and make sure that the data remains secure.
In addition, you should enable customers to access and review their data anytime they like, ask for updates of their data, and even allow full erasure upon request.
You can turn these tough requirements into new strengths that help you serve them better and improve trust and loyalty.
First, you can empower your customers by proving to them that they truly have ownership of their personal data.
Compare this to your likely current situation: Way too often, it’s difficult for customers to realize when their consent is being sought, or when they ‘consent’ to an action related to their sensitive data and what will happen to it.
In this context, if a competitor is vague and obscure, while your business is transparent and empowering, it’s probably obvious which one of you will outshine in the eyes of the customer.
Another important consideration is trust. Each step you take to be compliant, including all the improvements you make to the security of personal data, helps you build trust with customers. Communicating your compliance enables you to emphasize your trustworthiness. And reliability is the basis of all lasting relationships. By implementing GDPR your “trust ranking” may climb higher than ever before.
2. A full view of each customer
Preparations for GDPR may force you to upgrade major IT systems that are obsolete or about to become such. This may strain your budget in the short term, but in the long run, your business will reap its benefits. Quite probably, your renewed IT will bring along plenty of ways to offer new solutions and services that benefit you and your customers.
Just think of the potential of consolidating data from deep silos into a uniform platform. This will enable a full 360 degree view of each customer. The enhanced visibility will enable your business to better serve customers, respond to their requests, engage them in ways they prefer, pinpoint their needs in one moment of time — and to be aware of any warning signals of churn.
Another aspect that is rarely mentioned is data portability. The GDPR demands that each customer must have the right to transfer their data anywhere they like (see the EU’s PDF about data portability). Data portability can also be turned into a business benefit. As a business, you may be forced to create data assets that enable data portability; however, whatever technical methods you choose to use, the result will be a more agile and future-proof system, even if no one ultimately wishes to transport their data.
Finally, you should not forget this significant bonus: Through GDPR compliance, your business becomes ready to receive data transferred from a competitor, giving you the data histories of your new customers, so you can better serve them from the start of your new relationship.
Excel in GDPR, and reap the resulting benefits from empowering your customers, seeking only data that’s needed, directly from the source, and leveraging it to build better, long-term relationships through better service.
Dattaca Labs is a living lab that is leading the personal data economy from Iceland. The business works with public institutions, local and multinational companies, and entrepreneurs to develop innovative solutions and services across a wide range of sectors, including health tech, fin tech, telecommunications, and IoT. Its mission is to help businesses and institutions improve the value exchange between end users and digital value providers, with an emphasis on empowering the individual.
