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 the economic well-being. We have seen in the past that firms especially from financial sector have undergone structural changes like de-regularization to infuse efficiency thereby passing positive benefits to 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.

Is the digital medium safe to share my personal details?

Knowing customer data helps firms to understand their needs better thereby firms can focus only on areas which interest customers. By doing so, companies will save few millions of dollars and shall pass on those benefits to investors or customers. Currently, consumers do understand the positives of sharing data. Having said this, majority of consumers are now skeptical about how corporations use their data. To address the key privacy issues and consumer’s rights regards to Data sharing, European Union has drafted General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). We all would have found elements of transparency in company’s annual reports once. Now it is legislated mandate for firms to document and execute with utmost care. From customer’s perspective, consent is not just a one-time permission — ‘you accept the terms and we will leverage all possible data’. The process of consent is a new engagement journey which runs in parallel with other regular engagements.

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

Social media fueled data explosion and technology started consuming data to derive actionable insights. There is a line on sand separating data that could be leveraged by companies from the rest. This has led to the formulation of European Union’s GDPR. It proposes that 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 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 will follow a similar suite.

Staying compliant with GDPR…

From 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 requests from 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.

By creating a unified profile of a user, CDPs enable marketing teams channelizing campaigns on most preferred segments. With the unified profiling, CDP shall support users by providing tools to manage their preferences which will eventually help companies to stay 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. 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 share data without any inhibitions as they will start believing that they are being protected by the regulatory bodies.

For a progressive future!

The journey of customer data from collection to applying insights will traverse across different digital assets. Open Data Initiative (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 process of consumer data consumption. Going forward, many software majors will join the fly wheel rotating at a much higher speed.

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. Industry experts suggest that majority of businesses under-utilize their martech stack eventually affecting the marketing efficacy and driving down the ROI. We believe high-velocity marketing has true potential to transform the existing infrastructure maximizing the impact of marketing efforts.