In the modern business landscape, data is at the center of understanding your customer and creating a viable customer relationship. Establishing and keeping that customer’s trust is key to ongoing sales and referrals. How do you balance the desire to use data that you collect while also respecting the privacy of those from whom you collect it?
Data is a critical asset and with this asset comes critical responsibility. Your customers expect you to “do the right thing” 100% of the time regarding their personally identifiable information (PII).
There are two primary ways for trust to be breached and lost:
• The mishandling of data by you or trusted partners in your ecosystem
• Failed security, the leakage of data to unauthorized agents or eyes by you or partners
It is important to realize that regardless of how a breach occurs, your customers and the court of public opinion will still be holding your brand accountable for any perception of injustice or sloppiness in the care of personal information because it was to you that the information was originally entrusted.
Before you allow customer data out of your control into the hands of a partner/vendor you—or someone working on your behalf— should vet them for several data-centric functional areas including collection limitation and use minimization, access and storage, onward transfer and actual practices.
From a customer’s perspective, if a ball is dropped, it doesn’t matter where it’s dropped if they feel harmed by it. This means that everyone in your business ecosystem must be following the rules that you establish, at all times and in every scenario that PII comes into play.