Why businesses are putting privacy concerns at the heart of their operations

As privacy has become increasingly important to consumers, organizations have been forced to update their business plans, as revealed at CX Network’s All Access Customer Communications Management. Customer experience executives from Zappos, TSB Bank and M&T Banks were on hand at the free-to-attend online event to explain why businesses should respond to customer concerns by building trust and proving product value when acquiring first-party data.

During the event’s closing session, Using data to truly understand your customers and create memorable experiences, Alex Genov, author of Forget the Customer, See the Person and head of marketing insights and customer research at Zappos, recommended businesses ask their customers for their data before swiftly delivering value through relevant offers and content.

Expanding on this approach during his own session, Chris O’Brien, SVP of product management at M&T Bank, pointed to a common strategy within the publishing industry in which businesses ensured consumers were initially granted free online access to a limited number of articles before a pay wall was implemented or sign-up required to access further content.

O’Brien recommended brands to ask for data after they have gained consumer trust by proving the value of their products first. This approach nurtures relationships and encourages brand endorsements, before eventually moving consumers down the sales pipeline to become paying customers.

Muss Haq, strategic insights manager at TSB Bank, echoed the importance of trust during his session, Why understanding emotional engagement is the key to good communications management, adding that organizations should build trust and ultimately gain custom by offering convincing products and making customers feel valued.

ON DEMAND: Watch Alex Genov talking about customer data collection 

Identity is key to retention

Zappos' Genov used his session to demonstrate that organizations that wished to pursue meaningful, actionable segmentation would require a deep knowledge of their customers. Referring to the “megatrend of big data”, he warned against the false assumption that more data equals better personalization, noting that most personalization models were merely best-guess recommendations.

Genov emphasized that segmentation worked best when based on psychological variables gathered and analyzed through a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program. Since implementing its VoC program some years ago, Zappos has gathered 900,000 customer comments, which it has claimed to have used to segment its customers effectively.

M&T Bank's O’Brien referred to the necessity of building an ID-based relationship that enabled companies to truly understand what their customers want and enabling them to devise what he termed “effective marketing strategies”. He cited an “identity key chain” that consolidated data gathered on each customer.

ON DEMAND: Watch Muss Haq explain how to create emotional engagement 

The importance of emotional engagement

The focus of the session delivered by TSB Bank’s Haq was on why CX and marketing teams must prioritize emotional engagement. Haq explained that while very useful, NPS scores only show organizations how each experience was rated “on average”.

His closing advice to organizations was to remember that customers judge their experiences primarily on how they were feeling at the peak of an experience and at the end of an experience, indicating a certain amount of leeway in a customer’s final judgement.

ON DEMAND: Watch Chris O’Brien talk about marketing without third-party cookies