The biggest reason for firms to comply to GDPR

What is the biggest reason for firms wanting to comply with GDPR?

It is in fact the need to meet customer expectations, and not, as many of us would have thought, the fear of legal action. 

"The greatest challenges for the respondents to becoming GDPR compliant included the complexity of the regulation and the shortage of qualified internal staff and privacy expertise needed to deal with those complexities. Contrary to the common view that the fear of GDPR fines would be the prime motivator for companies to become compliant, the respondents overwhelmingly cited support of their corporate values and meeting the expectations of their customers and partners as the primary drivers. In terms of progress with respect to which processes were brought into compliance first, the respondents are furthest along with customer facing processes such as cookie consent management and individual rights management and most behind on noncustomer facing issues such as international data transfer mechanisms and vendor management."

This is the result of a recent survey by TrustArc to over 600 UK and US companies. See the full July 2018 survey here.

Focussing on customer expectations, what we suspect customers actually want is a simple way to access the data that companies hold on them. Check and adjust their consents, and if necessary exercise the right to be forgotten. If you can give customers this option by using a simple click through from your website, you will be taking the lead in this important aspect of the customer experience. And it is with this in mind that we have built this capability into UniFida, our cloud-based customer data platform technology. So when we are connected to your website and customers have authenticated themselves, they can self-serve all the necessary GDPR functionality.

It’s not magic, it’s just technology!

Get in touch with me if you want to find out more or want to talk about your own expectations for the ideal customer data platform technology.