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GDPR - What’s the status two years after its go-live?

· 4 min read

The Contactlab platform was and is there. Investments continue in this direction as well. Many features have been introduced to make it easier for your brand to ensure compliance in the customer engagement area. These activities are very close to all the topics covered by the regulations in force since May 2018.

What about companies? According to one of the most recent analysis available, more than 50% of companies worldwide still seem to care too little (MarkMonitor). When we talk about customer data, we are talking about personal data. Every day we all find ourselves, more or less consciously, dealing with personal data:

  • Consumers: when they navigate e-commerce, enter the store and make purchases with their loyalty card, publish on social networks, call their favorite gym to renew their subscription… they leave their fingerprints everywhere, leave their data at all times.
  • Brands like yours: when you send emails, promote surveys, when customers call your call center or visit your site… you’re faced with a huge amount of data that is very valuable for your customers’ knowledge and you can’t miss it.

Key words: awareness and responsibility​

While it takes consumer awareness of what data they are communicating to you and better to know how and when it could be used, it also takes brand responsibility to manage data in careful, shared and compliant way.

On these points, however, it seems that there is still a lot to do. The companies themselves say so, but also the numbers: first of all, the total value of the fines so far exposed at EU level is around 114 million euros and 161 thousand violations identified. On top the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom. Italy is in third last position but we are still talking about 11.5 million euros for 1900 sanctions.

Still too much especially if you think that, even if with some significant exceptions, the investments needed to get in order are not impossible to deal with. These are certainly important resources, but they are considerably reduced when you think of the value they bring.

GDPR is also an opportunity​

The risk of high fines should not be the driver. The GDPR offers brands like yours also opportunities, and at different levels. Every company should evaluate them and try to seize them. Among them all:

  • Improve customer engagement by collecting and managing data ethically.
  • Enhance brand reputation by treating data in a compliant manner and creating trust in your consumers.

Either way, you will have a positive impact on the data available to you that is enriched – when your contacts are reassured by your ethically impeccable policy – and that is of higher quality – when your consumers know that thanks to data they provide you, they can get communications, offers, promotions, initiatives really tailored to them and their needs. All this has an immediate and significant impact on your marketing activities – and not only that – that they can enjoy fresh and clean information.

In addition to high security in the data storage, the Contactlab Marketing Cloud allows you to manage your customers’ data dynamically, ensuring that they are updated at all times and controlled.

The features introduced since the go live of the GDPR have been different and at every level and provide the platform with the necessary tools so that you can activate all the measures to be in compliance with the directives of the European regulation.

  • Strict policies allowing you to provide access to data only to selected figures.
  • Controls on where to store and how to use personal data. Collected data can be easily found in the unique profiles of each contact. You can manage and map everyone’s consent in predefined fields. Correct, delete and export them.
  • Data governance tools designed for better transparency on both the data collected and the status of consents.
  • Ability to demonstrate how compliance with regulatory principles is managed and monitored.
  • Constantly evolving data security and data protection systems for possible breaches.

How do we get to compliance together?​

The Contactlab platform can assist your Data Controller in demonstrating:

  • The collection of explicit consent from data subjects, including privacy policies and consent requests.
  • Effective management of Data Subject rights requests.
  • The adoption of data storage architectures suitable for tracking and storing consents and the exercise of the rights of data.

Contact us and a team of experts will help you to:

  • Identify the need for personal data processing.
  • Identify the systems through which you operate the processing.
  • Understand the areas to cover and how the platform can support the management of personal data in your marketing activities.