A while back, when I ran an Insurance brokerage, a good friend of mine who owned a mid-size company said, “you know Doug, when it comes to insurance the one thing I’ve learned is that the insurance carriers are only out to [bleep] us.” I can only imagine what CEO clients who weren’t my friends were saying.
However, when you are selling an intangible, like insurance, you are immediately starting with a trust deficit between you and your prospect. And it’s that deficit you need to overcome before you can hope to make a sale.
Privacy is an intangible, as well. You can’t see it. You can’t touch it. It’s a concept, a concept that is closely tied to our sense of ourselves and the freedom to express and “own” our identity as we choose. And, like other intangibles, companies have a trust deficit which they need to overcome if they want to establish strong customer relationships.
The need to bridge the trust deficit is a theme coming from a recent survey on consumer attitudes towards privacy that Deloitte has just released. As the article states, over two thirds of consumers believe their data is used primarily for target marketing and over half believe the data is shared with third parties. And, ironically, despite increasing privacy legislation, only 22% of companies are aligning their privacy requirements with business strategy.
This is an epic fail on two fronts: 1) misalignment of privacy compliance with strategy will inevitability result in the sub-optimal compliance measures which open the organization to regulatory action; 2) misalignment of privacy with strategy keeps the organization from taking advantage of a huge opportunity to leverage privacy as an asset to develop stronger customer relationships and propel growth.
For companies that want close the Privacy Trust Deficit, increase market share and improve operational and regulatory compliance, they can start with four steps: 1) Define the company’s desired relationship with its customers; 2) Outline privacy requirements as minimally defined by regulation and maximally defined by the company’s desired relationship with its customers; 3) Create a customer data and engagement map which defines how,, why and what the company does with its client data; 3) Express each point of the data and engagement map in terms of a repeatable behavior with a quantifiable outcome that both leverages and enhances privacy and customer value; 4) Communicate and be transparent of the privacy-related behaviors the company is doing at the same time it is doing them.
Applying these steps will help align privacy with business strategy, minimize the privacy trust deficit and enable the organization to take market share from it’s competitors who view privacy as a compliance objective as opposed to a strategic opportunity.
