GDPR Compliance: a trigger for Data Quality & Customer Excellence
Fear not. You can kill more than two stones with one bird, can’t you? Reason Praxis shows you how.
Executive Summary
In this blog, we present a Praxis direct application supporting the idea that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance is an unknown and underestimated key allowing Shareholders and C-Suite Executives to unlock a virtuous circle of Information and Data Quality Improvement (IDQI) and Customers Excellence (CEx / CX ) achievement.
As a consequence, shifting Business philosophy and Business models in this direction contributes to Strategy Delivery, Business Excellence and Corporate Social Responsibility.
We wrote previously about issues related to GDPR compliance and its impact on businesses or even international relations: CJEU Schrems 2 Decision and other posts related to GDPR.
There are several levers an organisation can activate to shift its internal and external relative Performance on a given market: Customers Excellence (CeX) and Information and Data Quality Improvement (IDQI).
These are two key pillars that C-suite can confidently focus on to reach substantial robust results, even in the short term.
We show in this article how Reason’s Praxis applied to GDPR Compliance gives Shareholders and C-suite executives powerful levers to shift I/ Data Quality and II/ Customers Excellence, enabling in turn Strategy delivery, Business Excellence and Corporate Social Responsibility.
Definitions used in the article
Whenever we mention the following, we mean:
General Data Protection Regulation Compliance (“GDPR”): Respect, compliance and proper implementation of the EU General Data Protection Regulation now in place in UK Law since May 2018, as well as the body of Guidance around it as made available by the UK ICO, EU ICOs and the European Data Protection Board (“EDPB“).
Corporate Social Responsibility (“CSR”): the evaluation of how organisations do their business and take responsibility for the impact of their model towards the protection of life and wellbeing.
Information and Data Quality Improvement (“IDQI”): the continuous process of setting up rigorous rules, and assessing their permanent enforcement across all activities, that ensure accuracy and veracity of existing, produced or acquired information and data. Data is one way only to express Information, while Information is not always Data, though.
Customer Excellence (“CEx” or “CX”): a framework set up with a body of values, principles and rules that aims to produce in the eyes of both customers and external partners the documented certitude that the business delivers on their promises, acts with loyalty, and genuinely respects them as an integral part of the whole business model and their CSR commitment.
Strategy Delivery: the course of action, impact and outcome throughout space and time of a Business Strategy.
Business Excellence: the final keystone and outcome wrapping altogether Reason’s Praxis Services in action: 1) Strategy’s success, 2) Business Continuity/Resilience & Risk Governance, 3) Performance & Outcomes Management, 4) Continuous Improvement, 5) Insights & Analytics.
I/ GDPR Compliance and Information & Data Quality Improvement: converting a perceived constraint into a powerful opportunity
Although it is true that GDPR is a complex subject, through which it can be difficult to find one’s way, GDPR Compliance is one of the key regulatory requirements organisations need to keep in mind for their own good, and those of their customers and partners. It is also about fair competition and, eventually, a common order in a society where we know where we stand.
The positive trigger that Reason offers Shareholders and C-Suite executives is that what often seems a constraint with GDPR is, in reality, a powerful opportunity to address one of the key business issues: Information and Data Quality Improvement (IDQI). This means killing two stones with one bird, as a first direct outcome.
We hear Data are everywhere but where is Information? Data can be information, but don’t get confused that data is information: it is only a certain way to represent what is around us, and this will happen only in the way we decided to represent this.
Information and Data quality is at the image of how well institutions and organisations have managed the translation of reality into information, and information into its expression as data.
In order to get the right data, one needs the right information. If it is not expressed clearly, in a robust and scientific method, data will be wrong.
No data analysis, data science or even AI can fix fundamentally wrong data. If you don’t set it up properly upfront using human rigorous thinking, it’s a waste of time and money to believe AI or some tech software would fix it. [Any IDQI programme starts with both Strategy and Business requirements, towards the single version of the truth – more here].
We produce a lot of data and need to cope with it. Organisations hold almost always data silos underpinned by layers of IT systems and software legacy, in addition to new layers of vendors’ solutions, which pertinence changes every six months, or so. Adapting strategies to address market evolutions drives new ways of collecting, storing and consuming data. The impact of an evolving regulatory environment, articulated with a moving international context, adds to the challenges they need to manage.
New ventures and startups have the relative chance to be able to set up their Information and data architectures, governance and management from scratch, hence avoiding the burden of what can come most of the time with standard legacy transformation, management and integration, but face other challenges when it comes, for instance, to digesting the pace of growth resulting from a successful penetration of their market with new products and services.
Therefore, the task of collecting and improving proper information and data is huge. This is where GDPR compliance comes in and helps us massively.
GDPR opens the opportunity to have data subjects (customers, partners and people more generally) update their personal data and information themselves.
This will generate not only an overall IDQI but also allow a business to measure “data subjects'” (as stated in the regulation) engagement. This also allows users, consumers and customers to contribute to the business by giving it access to reliable, up-to-date and truthful data daily needed.
In summary, if properly, and we would say even fairly approached and nurtured, customers, people and business partners will become massive support for IDQI through GDPR.
The question is, therefore: will businesses have created a relationship with customers, consumers and other third-party partners that will generate the needed positive engagement and participation in such an enterprise?
What they harvest will result from how they will have interacted with their customers and partners across all their lines of business, including fair use of held data by properly addressing, for instance, Data Subject Requests, or by creating online interfaces and user experience that facilitates the way people can access and manage information businesses hold on them.
II/ GDPR Compliance and Customer Excellence: From a utilitarian culture of Customer Privacy towards a Customer-centric win-win partnership
The reputation of the business in the eyes of third parties will be a key element allowing the initiation of a virtuous circle of IDQI self-improvement.
Some big businesses may believe they have a strong position which can absorb risks and issues resulting from GDPR breaches, but it is a short-term approach, unsustainable.
Individuals that are loyal to the relationship they have with the business play a role much more important in improving information and data than the wrong belief that buying self-declared ‘up-to-date data’ or paying expensive data cleaner providers will be the solution.
It is too often an illusion that will only lead to a massive flow of data more or less robust and legally acquired, with no real guarantee about its fundamental consistency, veracity and quality for the business. This myth often leads organisations into the area of what we call at Reason the Risk of DataVirus.
There is an iterative interaction between GDPR Compliance and customer excellence: in complying with GDPR and doing things right (at least working in this direction), customers get ensured that their data is used as it should be, as they want it to be, even if they didn’t read the Privacy conditions – because these can’t be drafted in a way that deprives or opts-out customers of what is essentially their dignity and human rights.
Privacy policies can’t be written using wording that, for instance, would twist the letter and original intention of the GDPR. Some practices around privacy policies make online users opt out and waive their rights: we don’t believe this is the way to go.
Step by step, with fair relation-building, customers will grow in their confidence and trust in the brand. In turn, they become more engaged and familiar with the business, which they will happily support in keeping their data up to date, like answering surveys and making suggestions on how to improve some areas of the service they receive. This, in turn, will result in allowing businesses to send them better and more relevant offers, reducing risks of wrong parcel deliveries and ‘return abuses’. And if a data breach occurs, customers and partners want to see active, mutual and transparent cooperation to sort this out in order to better secure common’s future. But saying “sorry, it won’t happen again” will not look good enough when much could have been done to prevent and minimise the issue but hasn’t.
Many other factors contribute to building a solid and genuine Customers Excellence journey, and we are ready to discuss this with you, please get in touch.
Conclusion
GDPR compliance has become one of the less known but probably one of the most powerful triggers to generate Information and Data Quality Improvement (IDQI) and Customers’ Excellence (CX).
We believe proper compliance and third-party data respect will become more and more important, as this is in fine all about human dignity and rights.
Being prepared to embrace this evolution properly will definitively contribute to shifting the competitiveness of early adopters.
With proper GDPR compliance in place, Organisations and Businesses open powerful opportunities to leverage and address key issues that can become strong pillars of their strategic growth: IDQI, CX, smoother Strategy delivery, improving their Business Excellence and Corporate Social Responsibility.
GDPR Compliance becomes a positive externality, as defined in Economics.
Therefore, Businesses can definitely afford to kill more than two stones with one bird thanks to GDPR compliance.
Reason Praxis Services offers to assist Shareholders and C-Suite to get the best out of it.
Please contact us to discuss.
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