The IT dilemma: balancing data privacy and personalizing the customer experience
Posted: Sun Dec 22, 2024 9:21 am
Trust is at odds with consumers' expectations for personalization, according to a new study. Here's how IT leaders are making sense of it.
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Person sitting on chair looking pensive
Your phone buzzes with an email notification. Subject line: Important information about a recent security incident.
Sounds familiar, right? Unfortunately, security incidents are becoming more frequent, which means many companies are relying on trust to strengthen their customer relationships. Trust is the cornerstone of customer relationships, but in today’s changing data privacy and security landscape, it’s hard to gain and easy to lose.
Trust is at odds with consumers' expectations for personalization, new study finds
Companies and platforms are whatsapp korean number collecting more personal data than ever before, and consumers expect this data to remain secure in the face of evolving security threats. At the same time, government and industry compliance regulations are constantly evolving. This makes it challenging to balance privacy and security while working to improve the customer experience. This is even more so for companies in highly regulated industries, those that handle a lot of sensitive customer data, or those that follow their own strict privacy and security regulations.

Zendesk’s 2023 report, The IT Dilemma: Balancing Data Privacy and Customer Experience Personalization, contrasts these competing priorities. The report finds that 66 percent of IT leaders surveyed cite data privacy and protection regulations as a factor that significantly limits their personalization efforts.
Despite these challenges, companies with the right tools and partners can thrive in this changing landscape, meeting their customers’ need for greater privacy and security while generating increased customer trust and satisfaction.
Here are three ways companies can proactively maintain customer trust amid the changing data privacy landscape.
1. Remove personal data from customer conversations
Removing personal data from customer conversations can be a critical first step toward protecting customer privacy.
Customer conversations contain a wealth of information that can be used to personalize the customer experience, such as purchase history or previously closed tickets. The key is determining which personal information is relevant and which is not. This includes data such as credit cards, social security numbers, and passwords from support conversations.
Once companies know what personal information is not necessary to deliver customer experiences, they can use redaction tools to selectively and permanently delete that data from customer conversations. With advances in AI, this process is becoming increasingly smart and easy to automate.
Get the report
Person sitting on chair looking pensive
Your phone buzzes with an email notification. Subject line: Important information about a recent security incident.
Sounds familiar, right? Unfortunately, security incidents are becoming more frequent, which means many companies are relying on trust to strengthen their customer relationships. Trust is the cornerstone of customer relationships, but in today’s changing data privacy and security landscape, it’s hard to gain and easy to lose.
Trust is at odds with consumers' expectations for personalization, new study finds
Companies and platforms are whatsapp korean number collecting more personal data than ever before, and consumers expect this data to remain secure in the face of evolving security threats. At the same time, government and industry compliance regulations are constantly evolving. This makes it challenging to balance privacy and security while working to improve the customer experience. This is even more so for companies in highly regulated industries, those that handle a lot of sensitive customer data, or those that follow their own strict privacy and security regulations.

Zendesk’s 2023 report, The IT Dilemma: Balancing Data Privacy and Customer Experience Personalization, contrasts these competing priorities. The report finds that 66 percent of IT leaders surveyed cite data privacy and protection regulations as a factor that significantly limits their personalization efforts.
Despite these challenges, companies with the right tools and partners can thrive in this changing landscape, meeting their customers’ need for greater privacy and security while generating increased customer trust and satisfaction.
Here are three ways companies can proactively maintain customer trust amid the changing data privacy landscape.
1. Remove personal data from customer conversations
Removing personal data from customer conversations can be a critical first step toward protecting customer privacy.
Customer conversations contain a wealth of information that can be used to personalize the customer experience, such as purchase history or previously closed tickets. The key is determining which personal information is relevant and which is not. This includes data such as credit cards, social security numbers, and passwords from support conversations.
Once companies know what personal information is not necessary to deliver customer experiences, they can use redaction tools to selectively and permanently delete that data from customer conversations. With advances in AI, this process is becoming increasingly smart and easy to automate.