The dawn of the digital age has ushered in the powerful concept of Personalization. Customers today expect businesses to design personalized experiences for them. A PwC survey revealed that 82% of consumers are willing to share some type of personal data for a better customer experience. But they don’t want brands to get too personal either. Besides managing the thin line between personalization and privacy, businesses also have to deal with evolving government regulations and data privacy laws.
Creating a personal connection with customers while safeguarding their privacy can be a tricky balancing act. Privacy often seems to be at odds with personalization. So how do you ensure an optimal combination of thoughtful personalization and privacy protection?
The answer lies in leveraging a customer-centric BPM approach and combining it with the right cutting-edge technology. In this blog post, let’s explore the strategies that can help you strike the perfect balance between personalization and privacy while delivering outstanding customer experience.
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Business Process Management puts customer experience as the highest priority for any enterprise and counts both personalization and privacy as the core parts of it. The process of personalization ensures that your business makes every customer feel special and valuable. This further establishes customer trust and loyalty and helps businesses stand out from their competitors.
Consider that the brand experience for your customers starts when they interact with your website. A customer visits your website, accepts all cookies, and even signs up for a newsletter. An example of poor personalization practice in this scenario is using the collected information to follow your customers with ads across social media and search engines. Bombarding your customers with ads when they have only briefly scanned your page is going too far. This might create a negative impression on your potential customers.
An effective personalization practice is putting together streamlined BPM processes that send a newsletter with relevant content or allow customers to tailor their data and cookie settings. This helps in building trust while protecting customer data and privacy.
A real-life use case of leveraging personalization for superior customer experience without compromising on consumer privacy is the Disney MagicBand+ wristband. If someone makes a dinner reservation at Disney World using the MagicBand, the restaurant receives customer information that allows them to –
The customer is aware that they are sharing this information through this wristband and receive a magical experience in return.
The BPM-led customer experience prioritizes creating such meaningful relationships with users. Utilizing appropriate technology to track and engage customers based on their specific needs can help to enhance the overall customer experience.
While data collection is absolutely important to personalize a customer’s buyer journey, how much data you collect and how you use it, is also equally important. While customers are quite willing to provide data for personalized experiences, it’s important not to put pressure on them to share more information than they are willing to. Other ways of misusing customer data are tracking them everywhere or sending overly personal messages. Striking the right balance is crucial to avoid scaring off your customers.
Some of the best practices that you can embed in your BPM tools to ensure personalization without violating customer privacy are offering cookie customization, complying with the latest guidelines of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Digital Personal Data Protection Act of India (DPDP), or other privacy laws of the country where you’re offering your services.
With end-to-end customer support solutions, BPM processes collect and analyze customer data to get behavioral insights. This entails that you need to disclose how you use this data to your customers so that you can continue to deliver personalized experiences without violating clients’ privacy. To better understand your audience, business process management processes also leverage emerging technologies like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.
With the increasing concerns about data privacy, third-party cookies are being phased out by major web browsers like Google. Data collection is an important process in a customer-centric BPM platform. Without third-party cookies, your business will have to depend on customers voluntarily providing first-party cookies. Convincing customers to share their data has become challenging, as they are more cautious about whom they trust.
It is essential to go beyond building trust and offering something valuable to entice customers. This could mean upgrading your BPM strategy to include high-quality content, discounts, rewards, or other benefits that differentiate you from your competitors. Implementing self-service and interactive marketing strategies, such as chatbots, quizzes, surveys, polls, and contests, can help collect valuable customer data while keeping users engaged. These practices will strengthen your personalization messaging and enhance the overall customer experience.
Despite the fact that many consumers want to share their data to receive personalized services, they are concerned about data collection and what companies do with the gathered data. Customers may sometimes feel that the disadvantages of data collection outweigh its advantages.
Since data collection is an important stage in BPM-led customer experience management, your brand needs to allay customer concerns through proper communication on how you intend to use your customer data and also explain the benefits of personalization. Transparency is the cornerstone of the customer-centric BPM approach. Some of the strategies you can borrow from a BPM-enabled customer service system to ensure proper data privacy communication are disclosing any third parties with whom you share customer data, offering customers to opt out of data sharing with you or any of your third-party services, sending notifications on data and privacy policy changes, and explaining your privacy policies in an easily understandable manner.
By adopting these strategies, companies can effectively communicate their data and privacy policies to gain customer trust and alleviate concerns about data collection.
Read More: BPM and Customer Feedback Management: Driving Continuous Improvement in Customer Service Processes
The business process management (BPM) approach is all about ensuring positive customer experiences while building agile business processes. Personalization and privacy are two important pillars in the BPM-enabled customer experience journey and it is crucial to strike a balance between the two. Failure to do so not only jeopardizes clients’ privacy but can also have disastrous consequences for your business. If unauthorized access or inadequate security measures result in the loss or theft of customer information, it could severely harm your business and expose you to legal action. To avoid such risks, it is essential to invest in state-of-the-art technologies that protect users’ data and comply with data privacy regulations. Depending on a country’s laws, the data protection laws and regulations that you have to adhere to may change. These guidelines are regularly updated, and adhering to them will enable you to stay updated with current trends.
