Enterprises today face a tricky dilemma: In the race to create more personalized and meaningful brand experiences for customers, they must collect—and secure—more data than ever. Marketing algorithms rely on reams of digital identity data to predict and drive customer engagement; at the same time, laws increasingly require consumer consent. Privacy and identity are the new prerequisites for digital experiences and brand loyalty.
It’s a fine line to walk, but today many leading companies are navigating this challenge using managed service models, which can combine privacy and consumer preference requirements with data governance and control. Unlike traditional managed services or software-as-a-service models, however, these services deliver identity and privacy as an outcome. By blending consumer identity technology and data protection into an outcome-based offering, organizations can pave the way toward continual innovation and brand trust.
Evolving Regulations
Targeted, omnichannel advertising and promotions, location-based services and real-time notifications are just a few examples of the personalized interactions customers today expect across industries. Making these interactions possible are machine learning and deep learning algorithms, along with rapidly expanding volumes of data about consumers’ devices, purchase history, behavioral patterns and more. For many organizations, finding a particular customer’s data and responding to customer requests for personal information or data deletion can quickly become overwhelming. Not only is there a persistent shortage of talent skilled in data management, but many companies continue to rely on manual, labor-intensive, time-consuming and expensive processes to discover, classify and track each customer’s data.
Meanwhile, a growing number of regulations are placing strict limits on organizations’ use and sharing of consumer data. The message is clear: Companies that fail to give consumers the protections and control they want stand to incur stiff fines and penalties, reputation damage, and—worst of all—a loss of consumer trust.
A Combined Effort
Delivering personalized experiences while also preserving security and trust is no small feat. Blending consumer identity and data privacy technologies can deliver outcomes such as improved customer engagement, better governance and control, business enablement and increased brand loyalty and trust. Companies can harvest personal data from the sprawl of applications driving customer engagement, enabling them to derive value quickly without undergoing complex systems integrations, enduring a steep maturity curve or recruiting scarce talent.
Data privacy services help to manage consent and preference, individual rights requests, data discovery, risk assessment, incident management and analytics enablement, among many other considerations. Consumer identity services, meanwhile, include identity verification, multifactor authentication and identity data linking to help organizations create a single view of a customer across data platforms and marketing and advertising systems.
By enabling organizations to pinpoint each individual’s data across the IT ecosystem, the technology can enable strategic business goals while respecting consumer preferences. Some managed identity and privacy service offerings also integrate with companies’ legacy privacy, security and data management tools, allowing them to build upon and extend existing investments.
In today’s digital economy, every outcome depends on privacy and consumer identity as a point of trust, a perimeter of security, an enabler of relationship management and a means of service personalization. Outcome-based services can help enterprises harness digital identity and data management to reap the benefits of security and long-term customer value without incurring many of the technology, operational, regulatory and security risks that can come with trying to cobble together solutions on their own.
This is an adaptation of an article originally written for the WSJ Risk and Compliance Journal.
