Today’s enterprises are increasingly reliant on customer data to support go-to-market teams, build customer relationships, fuel analytics, and inform key business decisions that shape objectives and support objective-focused strategy development—from products and services to sales. As that reliance grows, so does the responsibility to manage the enormous volumes of customer data enterprises gather and retain in the everyday course of business. As trusted data stewards, businesses need to implement strong, consistent practices to secure customer data from breach—and ensure that its use is compliant with regulatory standards that include MNPI, GDPR, CCPA, and more.
What’s good for data compliance is great for business.
Ready for some good news? You’re in luck—because the good data stewardship practices that support customer data security and regulatory compliance are great for business.
Essential Practices for Data Compliance
Think about these increasingly essential business practices that just happen to be just as essential for data compliance:
Commit to Transparency
“We need to establish trust with customers. How do you do that? By being very transparent with what we collect and how we use it.”
Sajan Gautam, The RevOps and Data Security Partnership, Riva Rev-Tech Revolution Podcast
At the end of the day, data security and compliance exist to protect customers. And while it’s easy to get sidetracked by the business risks associated with data breach and misuse—it’s essential to keep customer trust at the heart of your compliance efforts.
The process of building that trust starts with transparency. From the moment your enterprise makes its first contact with a prospect, it’s vitally important to disclose your data use and retention policies. By telling prospects clearly how you gather and use their data, you’ll give them the opportunity to ask questions and set expectations. This step is an essential element of early customer experience—and it serves as the foundation for the trust you’ll seek to build and sustain over every engagement that follows.
Recommended Reading: Until You Can Trust Your CRM Data, Your Customers May Not Trust You
Invest in Data Quality
It’s one thing to have a lot of customer data. It’s another thing altogether to commit to the kinds of practices and technologies that unify, clean, and govern it from the moment it’s gathered.
“Compliance with regulations requires good quality data, and in order to have good quality data, you need to have effective data governance.”
Dr. Rupa Mahanti, Why Data Quality and Data Governance are Important to Achieve Compliance, Medium, 28 November 2022
Fortunately, the technologies and practices necessary to achieve these objectives have improved immeasurably over the course of the past five years. Revenue operations data integration solutions like Riva are designed to seamlessly integrate with revenue platforms like CRM and the communications platforms (think email, calendars, tasks, and contacts) that customer-facing teams utilize every day. These solutions effectively eliminate the need for inefficient, time-consuming data entry and transcription tasks by capturing customer data the moment it’s collected—and then applying tailored rules to catch and eliminate customer data errors, duplications, and omissions.
The benefit of these technologies? Errors that could compromise data security and compliance are caught before they’re compounded through repeated use. And by aggregating the resulting high-quality data to a single-source-of-truth CRM repository, the governance capabilities of these technologies allow enterprises to limit data access—adding yet another essential hedge against security and compliance risks.
Related Reading: Data Observability: The Essential Path to Data Quality—and Data Trust
Embrace Relationship Intelligence
“Customer 360 is essential to comply with the existing and emerging data privacy regulations. Compliance failure is a high risk in organizations that avoid integrating their data systems.”
Sonal Goya, Why Customer 360 Matters and What You Can Do About It, Medium, 11 July 2022
Well-designed revenue operations data integration solutions serve as customer 360 data gatekeepers. In the process of unifying and optimizing data, these tools ensure that the data ultimately populating your single-source-of-truth CRM is accurate, current, and—you guessed it—compliant.
Recommended Reading: 10 Smart Steps Towards Customer 360
RevOps data integration solutions like Riva unleash the power of relationship intelligence through their ability to continuously process customer data. First, these solutions capture data when it’s inbound, unifying it from communications platforms and departments across the enterprise—and eliminating errors, omissions, and duplications in the process. This step ramps up data quality, which in turn prevents the potential preservation and use of bad data that could trigger both data security and compliance complications.
Second, relationship management technologies govern and curate outbound customer data, further reducing the risk of unauthorized, non-compliant data use. By sending the right data to the right people at the right time, relationship intelligence solutions act as the ultimate hedge against both inadvertent and malign data misuse.
Leverage Artificial Intelligence and Automation
“Machine Learning and artificial intelligence are better than human. Wherever we are collecting data or whenever we are using data, there is a use for AI and ML.”
Sajan Gautam, The RevOps and Data Security Partnership, Riva Rev-Tech Revolution Podcast
Given their ability to process and rectify the enormous volumes of customer data gathered and retained by businesses on a day-to-day basis, AI-enhanced data integration and relationship management solutions like Riva play an increasingly vital role in ensuring data security and compliance. By leveraging AI, these solutions are able to eliminate data errors, duplications, and omissions during the transition from communications platforms to CRM. That high-quality data is then subject to careful, automated governance to prevent sensitive data from reaching unauthorized users.
In addition to its enormous power to improve and restrict the use of customer data, AI’s ability to process large volumes of data makes it ideal for data analysis and modeling. Working with high-quality data, AI is capable of accurately identifying data trends, making sound recommendations, and informing reliable projections. Enterprises can also utilize AI’s large language model content development capabilities to produce targeted, compliant, multi-channel materials that allow customers to learn on their own terms—ultimately helping sales teams amplify their efforts and move customer relationships forward between one-on-one engagements.
Improve Digital Employee Experience
As the front-liners responsible for capturing customer data at its source, your sales teams play a vitally important role in efforts to reduce security and compliance risks. By arming them with systems and tools designed to make data capture simple, intuitive, and accurate, you’ll dramatically increase the likelihood that they’ll adopt them—and use them as they’re intended.
From a security and compliance perspective, improving digital employee experience enhances the likelihood that data is captured accurately and uniformly at the outset. And while AI-enhanced relationship management and revenue operations data integration tools like Riva can achieve remarkable post-collection customer data quality improvements, the impacts of accuracy (or inaccuracy) at the moment of collection are magnified as data is repeatedly processed, analyzed, and used to inform strategies and customer engagements.
Data Compliance: The Key to Customer Trust
There are countless reasons why the practices above make good sense. But in an era where enterprises have accepted the inarguable correlation between customer experience and business growth, customer trust should always register as a top corporate priority. And it should come as no surprise that data security, compliance, and customer trust are inextricably interconnected.
If you are looking for a data-compliant and secure data operations software, take a look at Riva. Being a SOC2 certified solution, Riva Engine is a preferred tool for multiple organizations in regulated industries, such as finance and others.
Get in touch with us to learn more about Riva.
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