Please, take my data!

Imagine your credit card customer service sending you an e-mail with a truly convenient promotion for a show of a band you love. What would you think?

“That’s too good to be true, must be phishing.”?
“Such a lucky day! Let’s confirm!”?
“My privacy has been terribly violated and someone will pay for it.”?

In our opinion, current discussion about privacy misses two fundamental subjects – and this makes the discussion both biased and terribly boring.

A lot of people would open the access to some of their data to a company, if it is able to deliver a relevant customer experience using them (and to clearly explain how it will work as BEN EVANS from VC Andreessen Horowitz (‘a16z’) says in his newsletter The periodic privacy blow-up this time happened at Spotify”, which asks for access to your photos so you can add an avatar and your contacts so you can share music with your friends, if you want to, but let the lawyers draft a new privacy policy and as a result got mobbed by people claiming it wanted to invade their privacy. Reminder: privacy policies, release notes and everything else are now customer communication.”

[Tweet “Data Analysis today is really a huge opportunity to obtain a dramatic improvement of services.”]

This may sound obvious, but it’s striking how the actors that will benefit more from this are totally ignoring the trend: consumers!

Neuromarketing has demonstrated that the consumer cannot identify rationally what she likes (see the criticism of the methodology of focus groups). On the other hand, an algorithm analyzing her purchases would be able to clearly establish what really fascinates her and therefore offer tempting options. And it’s likely that the consumer wouldn’t have ever considered some of them.

But the best part arrives just now: there is space for both people who agree with this use of data and people who don’t as companies have the tools to give to each customer the choice of whether and how giving access to their data and online behavior.
Two different customer experiences will be available: the plain one and the data-enhanced. No doubt a that a good bunch of people with a “plain plan” will switch to the latter once they see the added value.

Here at ROIALTY we believe that properly managing personal data is one of the most compelling opportunity that both the market and the customers can enjoy. The challenge for companies is not just obtaining and protecting customers data: they have to know how to read, aggregate and analyze at the right moment and in the right contexts, in order to offer a value added experience. Something like overcoming omni-channel and going “omni-customer”.
ROIALTY is pretty good at helping companies in these tasks, get some more details. And make your customers run to you with their data!