Boss-someone stole our customer data!!
Posted by Ajay Kelkar on Sun, Sep 05, 2010
Last week there was this interesting article in the Mint newspaper by Vandana Vasudevan about customer information being out in the open. You may be the customer of a bank or a telecom company or a retailer –somehow that information is out there with a variety of grey market database sellers! I wrote about the loss of privacy in a previous post here : Whose data is it anyway?
You can access the Mint articles here : Found in a lost database!
The catch about data security in today’s companies according to me is as follows:
- Customer Centricity is itself not still a focus-given that markets are growing rapidly, Marketers are growing often by bringing in “new users” and so like a leaky bucket they are not obsessed with customer churn yet and that also makes them less customer focussed.
- In a global survey of 1,375 subscribers conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services in January 2010, 85% of respondents said that information is a key strategic asset, yet only 36% said their organizations are currently well positioned to use information to help grow their business.
- One aspect that I wanted to point out was that the source of all of this is the Marketer's budget-if regulation comes down hard on the source brand it would drastically change the equation. Today we are chasing the telcos, telemarketing companies or the small grey market database companies-where is the focus on the brand owner whose message it is !
- Customer data therefore is still not valued as much as it should be and though every one mouths platitudes about data security –the fact is that it is often compromised.
- Not too many Marketing heads(CMO’s ) focus their efforts on extracting revenue yield from existing customers and that leaves relatively junior people driving this agenda. Analytics can help show the value of this data!
- Ironically in many businesses where regulation drives a “Know your customer” regime like banks or Risk standards push the banks to do what is called a “customer point verification”-there is an army of cheap resources out there in the market confirming that you are who you claim to be….no one monitors this stream of potential data loss as carefully!
- And finally, people do not pay attention at all to two other streams of data-Prospect data & Lapsed data. Especially customers who cease to be customers of a bank or Retailer, then end up as databases on the market further muddying a “grey market”