Regulation — a key milestone in digital evolution

Creating efficiency in the digital world…

In the modern world, theories of economics reiterate the fact that introducing efficiency into systems will improve economic well-being. Firms especially from the financial sector have undergone structural changes like de-regularization to infuse efficiency thereby passing positive benefits to the customers. Technology companies are no exception to this philosophy. Tech giants like Amazon, Google are breaking the barriers in the digital landscape to create a unified ecosystem for end-users. Consumers will be able to reap maximum benefits only when there is ‘complete connectedness’ to the ecosystem. For instance, Google, started as a web search engine, with its mail services connects customers through multiple facets like Google maps, searches.

Is the digital medium safe to share my personal details?

In the digital era, knowing customer data helps firms to understand their needs better thereby firms can focus only on areas that interest customers. By doing so, the companies will save a few millions of dollars and shall pass on those benefits to investors or customers. The need for customer data and its impact on the business community is an old story now. Currently, consumers do understand the positives of sharing data. Having said this, almost 48% of consumers are now skeptical about how corporations use their data. Few happenings in the recent past, especially frequent security breaches, add to the source of customers’ fear. To address the key privacy issues and consumer’s rights regards to Data sharing, European Union has drafted General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). Stakeholders once would find elements of transparency in company’s annual reports but now it is legislated mandate — firms are needed to design, document, and execute with utmost care. From customer perspective, consent is not just one-time permission — ‘you accept the terms and we will leverage all possible data’. The process of consent is a new engagement journey that runs in parallel with other regular engagements with consumers.

European Union signals the world about the need for digital regulations!

As social media, a prominent use case of internet, is well-received by millions of people across the globe, everyday few zeta bytes of data is created, stored and shared. From this point, technology started consuming data to derive actionable insights. Government bodies stated there is a line on sand separating data that could be leveraged by companies from the rest. Hence, it was inevitable for drafting regulations about data privacy and security. This has led to the formulation of European Union’s GDPR. It proposes that the consumers have rights to protect data pertaining to private lives and control the digital feed. The regulation not only considers about the existing customers but empowers the ex-customers to delete their data marks with a company. Companies which don’t comply with GDPR, will have face serious lawsuits and might be penalized. On similar lines, California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) lays out the data privacy guidelines in US. To sum up, like financial institutions who are obliged to document and report their operations to the banking authority, companies using customer data to improve their marketing efforts will have to follow a similar suite.

Staying compliant with GDPR…

GDPR, as mentioned earlier, lays the foundation for customer’s right to access and right to deletion. From the operational perspective, handling customer’s requests to retrieve subject data is difficult. To address this issue, firms need a unified customer database that can be accessed by other tools. Customer Data Platform (CDP) serves this purpose by collating all customer data thereby helping brands to prepare for GDPR readiness. Customer data is stored in CDP while the process is being orchestrated by a data controller; the brand itself will act as a data controller handling the requests from the users. CDP, at the other end, is architected by technological partner and retrieves data based on the requests shared by the data controller. In this simple manner, CDP enables brands to adhere to GDPR compliance and create a continuous seamless consent procedure between the brand and its customers. CDP systems also open GDPR API to better serve the customers by automating the GDPR process thereby optimizing the process.

CDPs are efficient in responding to requests from the customers not just in terms of speed but consolidating an extensive amount of data it had unified about a customer. By creating a unified profile of a user (includes channel preferences), CDPs enable marketing teams channelizing campaigns on most preferred segments. On similar lines, with the unified profiling CDP shall support users by providing tools to manage their preferences which will eventually help companies to say relevant with GDPR. Data regulations are hitting the digital landscape as customers weigh on privacy-focused experience. In this scenario, CDP gives organizations an extra edge as it relies on first-party data. Having a tangible consent program in place, CDP will secure customer’s trust over privacy issues. CDPs

Though data privacy regulations like GDPR create uncertainties to the ongoing operations, these regulations provide new opportunities as well. Structural changes will push even the late adopters to follow the suite by sharing data without any inhibitions as they will start believing that they are being protected by the regulatory bodies. To control the consent process, companies will open a meaningful two-way dialogue evolving organically over time which will lead to greater trust on the brand. Establishing transparency in every transaction with customers shall increase the loyalty points thereby improving the customer life-time value.

Tech giants pushing the market for a progressive future!

Adobe, Microsoft and SAP joined hands to launch Open Data Initiative (ODI) which will help companies to improve the process of governing consumer data while cautiously adhering to data privacy and security regulations in the domicile. The journey of customer data from collection to applying insights will traverse across different digital assets. ODI is developed with a novel idea of collaborating Adobe, Microsoft and SAP systems existing in the data pathway thereby adding flexibility. ODI is a key milestone in the evolutionary of process of consumer data consumption. Going forward, many software majors will join the fly wheel rotating at a much higher speed.

What does ODI suggest to the entire tech forum? Even though insights and data add phenomenal value to companies, the level of complexity involved in operating with data is astronomical. In simple terms, marketing function responsibly handles the entire spectrum of operations spanning from data to actionable insights. The answer to address all these operational hurdles is high velocity marketing. Industry experts suggest that majority of businesses under-utilize the martech stack eventually affecting the marketing efficacy and driving down the ROI. High-velocity marketing has the true potential to transform the existing infrastructure maximizing the impact of marketing efforts.