Customer Experience and Compliance: Finding the Middle Ground

Today, marketplaces are increasingly driven by customer demands.

Come to think of it, enterprise-wide transitions are underway all thanks to rising customer needs. Some companies are even toying with the idea of pivoting their business models to catch up with the constantly shifting expectations of the customer.

With the onset of the pandemic, organizations across industries have had to deal with an unprecedented level of customer requests. According to Wunderman, exceeding expectations throughout the customer’s journey is the way to go about it.

Source: Lucidpress

That said, even in today’s ‘experience-driven era’, Gartner reports that only a meager 14% of organizations have a 360° view of their customer.

To live up to customer needs and desires, organizations are doing their bit in gathering every conceivable data point on customers. This begs the question:

How can organizations shore up security and regulatory compliances while offering convenient services to satisfy customer demand?

Meeting customers at the intersection of convenience and security has only gotten a lot harder considering the remarkable pace of digital transformation that the pandemic has unfolded in key industries — especially in the financial services industry. Organizations today are walking a tightrope in meeting the demand for frictionless digital experiences while ensuring strong security protocols are in place. I’ll be honest, this is quite a task, given how it involves conflicting pressures driving organizations to compromise on one or the other. But this doesn’t have to be the case.

Customer experience Vs. Compliance: The ultimate trade-off?

With the proliferation of smartphones and the availability of blazing internet speeds, customers now expect nothing less than seamless, personal, and instant brand experiences with every interaction. For online shoppers this means — enjoying frictionless experiences all through the journey, right from browsing for products, adding it to their carts, and finally checking out and making the payments. Let’s not forget that all this is done with the customer’s trust that merchants will follow the highest standard of security for online payments.

For organizations dealing in payments, I’d like to point out that they need to go beyond the required compliance of Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and ensure that best practices for data security are adhered to. Failing to do this will wreak havoc. Not only will you be dealing with regulatory fines but also the irreversible damage to losing the customer’s trust once and for all.

Trust is the elemental factor that binds relationships across all walks of life. While established businesses are at loggerheads in winning market share, customers’ trust in the brand will play a key role in retaining market dominance.

With E-commerce fraud now mounting up to be a $20 billion problem, and data breaches making the headlines more often — almost tarnishing reputations, customers are only getting skeptical and their trust in some of the biggest brands is starting to decline.

Going by this PwC report, poor brand experiences are driving away customers faster than you think. Though 59% of customers walk away from the brand they love after several bad experiences, a good 17% of them will not think twice about switching brands, after just one bad experience.

Source: PwC: Experience is everything. Get it right

These numbers are no doubt hard to digest — the customer’s trust is the holy grail for businesses to succeed today.

With regulations worldwide cracking down on data practices, it’s time for organizations to get their balancing act right. If you ask me, adhering to regulatory compliances and building trust with superior customer experiences — should not be treated as distinct challenges. Leveraging secure digital solutions and having proper internal procedures in place, will help organizations incorporate compliance without hindering the customer’s experience.

3 ways to secure customer data and enable frictionless experiences

Worries of losing customers to a web of complex, (not to mention, necessary) compliant procedures are something that troubles most business leaders today. We need to put an end to this.

Follow these 3 steps to strike the right balance between compliance and customer expectations and not compromise on either, throughout the customer journey.

1. Break down silos: Ensure that functions across the organization have shared objectives and are in line with adhering to compliances throughout the customer journey. Bring disparate teams that are working in silos together and create a shared responsibility of ensuring compliance without hampering the customer experience.
2. Centralize data and streamline operations: Today, we cater to omnichannel customers. Integration between core channels and data centralization is imperative to ensure compliance and build journeys and experiences that customers can trust.
3. Reduce complexity: While incorporating compliance is a must, it must not hinder or make the customer journey more complex than it already is. Organizations today are looking at building compliance with everyday processes where to the customer, it all just comes down to ticking compliance boxes.

The bottom line

While you would agree when I say that convenience and efficiency never fail to wow the customer — it’s imperative to secure customer’s data while still managing to enable a frictionless experience.

With customer expectations and regulatory requirements continuing to rise, understanding the synergies between the two is what will help businesses thrive and delight customers every step of the way!