3 Tips for Building Customer Trust with Consent and Preference Management

Effectively and efficiently building customer trust with your consent and preference management practices requires strategic planning. The landscape that companies face in light of heightened consumer privacy expectations and regulations is complex, siloed, diverse, and fast-changing. However, the financial incentives to overcome these challenges have never been greater. In addition to incentives revolving around building trust in the customer relationship, reducing regulatory risk exposure, and automating these processes for efficiency, the deprecation of 3rd party cookies has also created urgency to bake privacy and data collection into CX in a more strategic way for supporting revenue generation programs for customer acquisition and retention.

Below, we offer guidance on how best to plan your consent and preference management strategy.

Additionally, for a short time, we are making the Gartner® Market Guide for Consent and Preference Management available for download at no cost. This research allows companies to evaluate consent and preference management capabilities, and make a balanced, forward-looking product choice.

The Situation 

The privacy and consent landscape is shifting rapidly in a way that’s critical for brands to adjust to both provide effective CX and comply with new regulations and technology changes. Based on Tealium’s 2023 State of the CDP Report, Privacy is the #1 goal for organizations heading into 2023.

No matter whether you don’t own a CDP or you’ve had one for 4+ years, better protections for customer data privacy is a top marketing priority, based on Tealium’s annual State of the CDP report. 

Diverse regulations are emerging that give consumers rights over their data. To comply, brands need to have control over data.

• These regulations (combined with tech changes and elevated customer expectations around privacy) restrict data practices, thereby chipping away at the options for companies to personalize experiences and measure engagement. In order to best compete with CX, this means brands need to get really good at gaining consent.
• Gaining explicit consent requires a successful value exchange with customers, so there is a strategic element in addition to the technology.
• Regional and use case compliance needs mean agile management of consent data is required

Siloed data not only leads to poor CX, but also an inability to honor preferences, build trust, and comply with regulations.

Brands need a central tool, integrated throughout the tech stack, that automates enforcement of privacy across the customer experience. Complementing this enabling technology, is the overall customer experience strategy. Here are some tips for building effective consent and preference management capabilities:

Some features the central solution technology should include:

• Tag management to streamline data collection on websites
• Integration with CMPs that manage privacy inventory and Data Subject Access Requests
• Central data management functionality that is automated
• Dashboards for visualizing the data supply chain throughout all journeys
• InfoSec certifications to validate their commitment and adherence to privacy regulations
• Identity resolution in real-time to ensure preferences are applied accurately prior to activation
• Broad integration with all other customer-facing technologies that incorporate the same privacy principles and deliver in real-time

For more information check out the Gartner® Market Guide for Consent and Preference Management available for download at no cost.

Tip 1: Make Privacy Purposeful

The first step towards creating a trusted dynamic with your customers is to only collect necessary data in a way that respects customer privacy. To achieve this foundational goal you can create (or optimize) a Data governance program with the following steps:

• Redefine what privacy means to your organization: Companies need to adjust internal mindsets around data privacy and literally bake respect for customer data privacy compliance into the core of their brand. Make sure it’s known that data privacy matters. 
• Draft a privacy manifesto – and make it public knowledge: Most customers find brands’ data security notifications extremely complex. In the US, only 3% of Americans say they understand how current online privacy laws actually work.  Pair that with the 79% of Americans who are not confident companies will admit to misusing their data,  and you can see the trust gap clear as day.
• Prioritize data privacy compliance— for both now and in the future: Given the global nature of privacy regulations and international business, if you haven’t started addressing policies like GDPR and CCPA, to name only a few, you need to start now.
  

Tip 2: Give Customers a Reason to Opt-in

When it comes to consent and preference management, how you collect your customer data is as important as what data you’re asking for. Customers are tired of being asked for permission and the fatigue from being constantly asked to provide privacy preferences when visiting websites is real. Follow these steps to ensure the customer comes back for more instead of taking their data and running:

1. Be transparent about your transparency.
2. Design a Value Exchange where and when it matters.
3. Turn your request for data into a CX of its own.
4. Make data access crystal clear.
5. Bake in future flexibility.

Dive into more specifics on How to Design an Ongoing Data Collection Strategy in this blog post.

Tip 3: Map Out a Customer Journey that Builds Trust
62% of customers expect brands to personalize every interaction and 74% said they feel frustrated enough to abandon an experience when the offer is irrelevant to them. By mapping out your customer’s unique and personalized journeys, you can obtain a better understanding of your customers and deliver one-to-one marketing communications that build trust. Make to plan with the following in mind:

• Define your customer audiences and segments in the context of consent and preference data.
• Plan out meaningful touch points and build in marketing automation.
• Be transparent on how you’re using their personal data throughout their experience.
• Make sure to provide off-ramps for customers in their customer journey.
• Include customer access to data controls in every channel.
• Keep your messaging and language consistent throughout.
• Build in enough flexibility to address the shifting privacy landscape.
• Avoid competing journeys for your customers.

To get more specifics about these recommendations and more, check out Tealium’s In Data We Trust ebook, A Guide for Establishing Customer Trust Through Privacy.

How Tealium Fits In

Tealium plays a multi-faceted, flexible role in helping organizations build trust with customers through privacy and consent and preference management practices. Here’s how Tealium can help:

• Capture consent with Tealium Consent Manager, or integrate with CMPs like OneTrust to ingest consent data
• Enable sophisticated value exchange strategies to optimize an organization’s consent rates
• Automate enforcement of consent preferences across the CX landscape by ensuring all actions are taken in the context of consent and preferences
• Comply with regulatory requirements for data subject rights by enabling better visibility, control, and management of consent and preferences for the company and the customer. For example, automate DSAR processes (Data Subject Access Request)
• Provide transparency and control for customers over their own data

Check out the Gartner® Market Guide for Consent and Preference Management solutions for additional information on what other capabilities can be incorporated into your consent and preference management strategy.

Gartner, Market Guide for Consent and Preference Management, Nader Henein, Bart Willemsen, Bernard Woo, 31 October 2022.
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