In today’s world, where data holds importance, businesses of all sizes must collect and analyze data to gain valuable insights into customer behavior, market trends, and operational efficiencies.

However, with a range of data collection methods, it can be daunting to determine which ones are most suitable for your business’s unique needs. This guest post aims to provide an accessible guide on how to choose effective data collection methods for your business.

1. Define Your Objectives:

Before delving into the realm of essential data collection methods, it is crucial to outline your objectives. Consider the necessary information you wish to gather. How do you plan on utilizing it? Are you seeking customer feedback on a product? Do you require insights about your target audience? By establishing defined objectives from the start, you can narrow down your choices and select methods that align with your goals.

2. Understand Your Target Audience:

The next phase, selecting the optimal data collection method, involves understanding your target audience. Different demographics have preferences when it comes to providing feedback or sharing information. For example, older adults may prefer written surveys or telephone interviews, while tech-savvy millennials might lean towards surveys or social media engagement. To ensure response rates and minimize biases, it’s important to consider the preferences of your target audience when selecting data collection methods.

3. Exploring Quantitative Methods:

If you’re aiming to gather information, there are effective methods available:

• Surveys: Surveys provide a flexible approach for collecting structured data from a large sample size. Online survey tools make distribution easy. Offer reporting capabilities.
• Experiments: By controlling variables and observing outcomes, experiments help accurately measure cause and effect relationships.
• Data: Analyzing existing records can offer valuable insights into consumer behavior patterns and help predict future trends.

4. Mastering Qualitative Techniques:

Sometimes, purely numerical data may not fully answer business questions. In these cases, qualitative data collection methods come in handy. Qualitative methods provide in-depth insights into customers’ experiences, opinions, and motivations.

• Focus Groups: These small group discussions encourage dialogue among participants, allowing for explorations of opinions and attitudes.
• Interviews: One-on-one interviews with customers can reveal valuable insights that go beyond what is captured in surveys or transactional records.

5. Leveraging Advancements:

The field of data collection has undergone a transformation thanks to recent technological advancements. There are now tools and platforms that make the process of gathering valuable data more efficient than ever before.

• Mobile Applications: One way to make data collection easier and more convenient for both customers and businesses is by developing dedicated mobile apps. These apps can be used to collect customer feedback or conduct surveys.
• Social Media Monitoring: Another valuable method is monitoring social media channels, which allows businesses to tap into real-time conversations by tracking mentions, hashtags, and customer sentiment.

6. Evaluating Costs and Resource Requirements:

When choosing a method for data collection, it’s important to consider the associated costs and resource requirements. Factors such as time constraints, budget limitations, and the size of the sample you plan to survey should be taken into account. Online data collection methods tend to be more cost-effective compared to methods that require input or fieldwork assistance.

By making a decision based on your resources, you can ensure that you achieve valid results without exceeding your limitations.

7. Ensuring Data Privacy and Security:

Regardless of the chosen method, prioritizing data privacy and security is crucial throughout the data collection process.

• Informing Respondents: It’s essential to communicate how respondents’ information will be used while also ensuring anonymity or confidentiality when necessary.
• Compliance Adherence: To ensure compliance with regulations, it is important to familiarize yourself with any industry-related rules that govern data collection practices, particularly those concerning privacy rights (such as GDPR).

Conclusion

When selecting the methods for collecting data for your business, it is crucial to carefully consider your objectives, target audience, budget limitations, and available resources. By establishing objectives from the start and understanding your audience’s preferences, you can make decisions that will provide valuable insights to facilitate decision-making. It is beneficial to combine qualitative techniques while taking advantage of advancements to gather data effectively. Lastly, prioritize data privacy and security throughout the process in order to maintain trust among stakeholders.

The call came in early Sunday morning: “Our systems are down after a cyber-incident, and we need to get our contact centre back up immediately. Our customers cannot phone us, which is a major problem as all our other systems are down, so we are completely cut off.”

This was the desperate plea from a major, global healthcare solutions company – and one of our customers here at Sabio – after a devastating ransomware attack had crippled their internal IT infrastructure. This attack took down their on-premise contact centre, resulting in them having no access to critical customer data and communications. It was a nightmare scenario.

Our customer took immediate action – shutting down certain systems and seeking assistance from external cybersecurity and forensic IT experts. But what about the contact centre solution that is vital to its operations?

This is where Sabio comes into the picture. And we had a plan…

Within hours of that distress call, our team spun up a 100-seat cloud-based contact centre solution ready to support multiple European countries powered by the Twilio Flex platform.

By the start of business Monday morning, our client’s customers throughout Europe could once again reach service agents, thanks to Sabio’s quick action, extensive contact centre knowledge and the flexibility of the cloud.

The Sabio Advantage 

Our preparedness was no accident. We maintain detailed playbooks for these exact crisis scenarios and recently helped a multinational home emergency repairs and improvement specialist following a similar cyber incident earlier in 2023.

On that occasion, Sabio launched new Contact Centre Platforms in the UK and US within 24 hours after a cyber-attack hit the Home Emergency Specialist’s outsourced contact centre platform provider. The speed and agility shown by Sabio meant customer service was maintained, and policyholders continued to receive the support they needed.

Whether due to ransomware, natural disasters or simple human error, we know that system outages, even in public cloud solutions can occur. But with the right cloud-based tools and experience, we can get customers back online by providing replacement contact centre and automation solutions in a matter of hours, not days or weeks.

In this most recent case, we provided a complete and modern cloud contact centre platform, including identity management provision (including Multi-Factor Authentication), within 8 hours. This enabled secure agent access from anywhere (i.e. the agent’s homes) without reliance on existing potentially compromised credentials. It was the fastest and most resilient way to restore customer service capabilities.

A Cautionary Tale

The attack on our customer, a Fortune 500 company and S&P 500 member, shows that no organisation is immune to the growing threat of cyber-attacks.

Between January and March 2023, Sophos – a cybersecurity software specialist – commissioned an independent survey of 3,000 IT/cybersecurity leaders employed by organisations operating across 14 countries. It found that it cost companies on average $1.82 million to recover from a ransomware attack — and that doesn’t even include paying a ransom. For companies with annual revenue of less than $10 million, the average cost of recovery was $165,520. For companies with annual revenue greater than $5 billion, the average cost of recovery approached $5 million. On top of all this, 84% of private sector organisations hit by ransomware said the attack had caused them to lose revenue as a result of lost business opportunities.

So, whether for large enterprises or small businesses, the need for preparedness and business continuity planning has never been greater. Events that seemed unthinkable years ago are now lurking around every corner.

At Sabio, we make it our business to implement contact centre technology and truly understand your business and customer journeys. We’ll work with you to identify and create contingency plans should the worst-case scenario happen, and your customers need peace of mind you’re on top of it.

And if the worst does indeed happen – and it can happen to anyone – you can trust us to bring calm, confident and rapid support when needed. That’s the Sabio way.

Don’t wait until you’re pleading for urgent help on a Sunday morning.

Reach out today, and let’s build cyber resilience and contact centre business continuity plans together. Your customers are counting on it…

In the meantime, read in full how we helped another customer, a multinational home emergency repairs and improvement specialist, recover after a cyber-attack rendered their contact centre platform inactive in the UK and US.

About the Author

Rob Scutchings is Chief Technology Officer at Sabio Group.

Sabio Group is a global digital customer experience (CX) transformation specialist with major operations in the UK (England and Scotland), Spain, France, Netherlands, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa and India.

The Group, which includes ‘makepositive’, delivers solutions and services that seamlessly combine digital and human interactions to support exceptional customer experiences.

Through its own technology, and that of world-class technology leaders such as Avaya, Genesys, Verint, Twilio, Google, Amazon and Salesforce, Sabio helps organisations optimise their customer journeys by making better decisions across their multiple contact channels.

The Group works with major brands worldwide, including Aegon, AXA Assistance, Bankia, BBVA, BGL, Caixabank, DHL, loveholidays, Marks & Spencer, Rentokil, Essent, GovTech, HomeServe, Sainsbury’s Argos, Telefónica, Think Money and Transcom Worldwide.

In today’s data-driven world, data resiliency has become a critical concern for organizations of all sizes. Disruptions and challenges such as cyber-attacks, natural disasters, human errors, and hardware failures can all result in data loss, downtime, and financial losses.

Data resiliency refers to an organization’s ability to recover quickly from these disruptions and challenges and to continue operating without any significant impact on its operations or reputation.

Understanding Data Resiliency

Data resiliency is the ability of an organization to ensure the continuity of its operations and the protection of its data in the event of disruptions or challenges. This can include recovering lost or corrupted data, restoring access to systems and applications, and minimizing downtime.

Data is one of the most valuable assets for organizations, and the loss or compromise of data can have significant consequences. This can include financial losses, legal liabilities, damage to reputation, and loss of customer trust. Data resiliency is important because it enables organizations to recover quickly from disruptions and challenges, minimize the impact of data loss, and maintain business continuity.

There are several types of disruptions and challenges that can affect an organization’s data resiliency, including:

• Cyber attacks: Malware, ransomware, phishing attacks, and other cyber threats can result in data breaches, data loss, and system downtime.
• Natural disasters: Floods, fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters can damage physical infrastructure and disrupt access to data and systems.
• Human errors: Accidental deletion, misconfiguration, and other human errors can result in data loss or system downtime.
• Hardware failures: Hard drive crashes, server failures, and other hardware issues can result in data loss and system downtime.

Steps to Achieving Data Resiliency

A comprehensive data management strategy should include policies and procedures for data backup, disaster recovery, and data retention. This strategy should also outline roles and responsibilities for data management and establish clear guidelines for data access, storage, and disposal.

Regular backups of critical data are essential for data resiliency. Backups should be stored in secure, off-site locations and tested regularly to ensure they can be restored quickly in the event of a disruption. Disaster recovery plans should also be developed and tested to ensure business continuity in the event of a major disruption.

Robust security measures such as firewalls, antivirus software, and intrusion detection systems are essential for protecting data from cyber threats. Access controls should also be implemented to ensure that only authorized personnel can access sensitive data.

Cloud-based data storage solutions offer several advantages for data resiliency, including scalability, cost-effectiveness, and redundancy. Cloud-based solutions also offer built-in backup and disaster recovery features, making it easier to protect critical data.

Regular audits and vulnerability assessments can help organizations identify weaknesses in their data management and security practices. These assessments can also help organizations stay up-to-date with the latest threats and compliance standards.

Employees are often the weakest link in an organization’s data resiliency strategy. It’s important to train employees on data protection and cybersecurity best practices to minimize the risk of human errors and security breaches.

Best Practices for Achieving Data Resiliency

Organizations should plan for worst-case scenarios by conducting risk assessments and developing contingency plans. This can include identifying critical data and systems, establishing recovery time objectives, and developing communication plans for stakeholders.

Backups and disaster recovery plans should be tested and validated regularly to ensure they can be relied upon in the event of a disruption. This can include testing backups to ensure they can be restored quickly, as well as testing disaster recovery plans to ensure they can be executed effectively.

Redundancy is an essential component of data resiliency. This can include redundant systems, redundant data storage, and redundant network connectivity. Redundancy helps to minimize the risk of single points of failure and ensures that critical systems and data can be accessed in the event of a disruption.

Data access and permissions should be monitored and managed closely to ensure that only authorized personnel can access sensitive data. This can include implementing access controls, monitoring user activity, and revoking access when necessary.

Staying up-to-date with the latest security best practices and threats is essential for data resiliency. This can include conducting regular training sessions for employees, staying informed about new security technologies and standards, and engaging with industry groups and experts.

Working with third-party experts can provide additional support for achieving data resiliency. This can include partnering with managed service providers for data backup and disaster recovery, engaging with security consultants for vulnerability assessments, and participating in industry groups and forums for best practices and knowledge-sharing.

Challenges to Achieving Data Resiliency

Achieving data resiliency is not without its challenges. Some of the most common challenges organizations face include:

• Balancing Resiliency with Cost and Complexity: Achieving a high level of data resiliency can be costly and complex. Organizations must balance the cost and complexity of implementing data resiliency solutions with the need to protect critical data and maintain business continuity.
• Ensuring Compliance with Regulatory Requirements: Many organizations are subject to regulatory requirements related to data management and security. Ensuring compliance with these requirements can be challenging, especially as regulations continue to evolve and become more complex.
• Managing Data Growth and Complexity: The volume and complexity of data are growing at an unprecedented rate, making it increasingly challenging to manage and protect. Organizations must invest in scalable and adaptable data resiliency solutions that can keep pace with their data growth and complexity.
• Protecting Against Insider Threats: Insider threats, whether intentional or unintentional, can pose a significant risk to data resiliency. Organizations must implement strict access controls and monitoring procedures to minimize the risk of insider threats.
• Keeping Up with Emerging Threats: The threat landscape is constantly evolving, with new threats emerging on a regular basis. Organizations must stay up-to-date with the latest threats and security best practices to ensure that their data resiliency strategies are effective.

Achieving data resiliency is critical for organizations of all sizes and industries. It’s important to remember that achieving data resiliency is an ongoing process that requires regular monitoring, testing, and updates. Organizations should always ensure that they are well-positioned to withstand disruptions and challenges and continue to thrive in today’s data-driven business environment.

The process of customer data management includes gathering, storing, arranging, and analyzing customer data with the aim of comprehending their behavior, preferences, and requirements.

It is crucial in helping businesses make informed decisions about their marketing, sales, and customer service strategies. However, managing customer data can be daunting, especially for small businesses with limited resources. In this article, I will provide 10 tips for customer data management success that can help businesses of all sizes effectively manage their customer data.

1. Understand Your Customers: The first step for effective customer data management is understanding who your customers are and what they need. Demographics, behaviors, and preferences related to the target audience are all things that need to be collected. One of the best ways to strengthen interactions with your clients is to develop a data management plan that is tailored to their specific requirements.

2. Establish Data Governance Policies: Establishing guidelines and processes for handling consumer information is crucial. Data collection, storage, and disclosure must adhere to these rules and companies must implement security measures to safeguard private data. Companies must guarantee the safety and integrity of their customers’ data by creating transparent data governance

3. Implement Data Quality Measures: The effectiveness of any customer data management plan depends on the data quality. It involves ensuring that data is accurate, complete, and relevant and developing steps to detect and correct errors. Using data quality procedures to guarantee that consumer data is trustworthy can lead to more accurate assumptions and improved decision-making.

4. Leverage Data Analytics: Data analytics can provide valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences, which can subsequently be leveraged to improve marketing and boost sales. Organizations that use data analytics can better understand their consumers and target their efforts more efficiently. Businesses should utilize data analytics technologies to gain insights into consumer purchasing habits, preferences, and demographics, which marketers can apply to build targeted marketing campaigns and boost overall customer engagement.

5. Prioritize Data Security: Protecting customer data is crucial to maintaining trust and preventing breaches. Suppose you are a managed service provider (MSP). In that case, it’s critical to have a reliable backup and disaster recovery solution, such as MSP backup from NAKIVO, to help your clients quickly recover from unexpected data loss. Implementing robust security protocols, including encryption and two-factor authentication, is essential to protecting customer data from cyber threats. MSPs must regularly monitor and test their systems to detect and address vulnerabilities before hackers can exploit them.

Utilizing robust data backup solutions is vital in the event of a security breach or accidental data loss. NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery solution allowing managed service providers to quickly restore critical customer data and minimize downtime.

6. Keep Data Up-to-date: It is important to regularly update customer data to ensure that it remains accurate and relevant. Removing outdated or duplicate information and updating contact details, such as email addresses and phone numbers, is one of the main priorities here. By keeping customer data up-to-date, companies can ensure that they are making the most of their data and can make better decisions based on accurate information.

7. Use Customer Data to Personalize Marketing Efforts: Personalization can be a powerful tool for engaging customers and driving sales. By using customer data to create tailored marketing messages, companies can increase the relevance and impact of their efforts. Personalization can be as simple as addressing customers by name in emails or as complex as creating customized product recommendations based on past purchasing behavior.

8. Integrate Data Across Systems: Connecting customer data across multiple systems and platforms can help businesses gain a more comprehensive picture of their consumers. It combines data from several sources, such as social media and website analytics, and data from various business divisions and departments. Merging data from different platforms can help them uncover new possibilities and increase overall customer engagement.

9. Be Transparent with Customers: Businesses should be honest about exploiting consumer data and allow customers to opt out of data collecting and sharing. They must establish clear and simple privacy rules and allow consumers to view and remove their data. Companies must create confidence with consumers and demonstrate their commitment to preserving their privacy by being clear about how customer data is utilized.

10. Continuously Monitor and Improve: Consumer data management is an ongoing activity that must be monitored and improved on a regular basis. It means assessing data governance rules and processes on a regular basis, as well as performing frequent audits.

In conclusion, competent customer data management is critical for corporate success. Companies can better understand their customers and use that knowledge to drive growth and improve customer engagement. This can be done by putting in place data governance policies, using data analytics, and putting data security at the top of the list.

Contact centres are giant candy stores full of rich, tempting data but how do you choose and where do you begin? Jim Davies shares five delicious tips for mastering effective data collation and optimisation.

I remember the good old days when sweet shops existed on every street. The walls were lined with shelves, filled with large plastic tubs of our favourites—rhubarb and custards, pear drops, lemon bonbons, kola cubes, flying saucers… Happy days.

If I owned a sweet shop, I’d be somewhat rotund as I am rather drawn to a sweet or six, apart from evil products like liquorice wheels and dolly mixtures that really need to be banned.

Bringing this ramble around to customer service, I feel the industry is very much like the sweet shop, but with a very slim owner. Our sweets are our data sources. We have a lot of different types and a plentiful supply, but they are just sitting on the shelf being ignored. And, it’s not just me, the latest statistics prove it. While consumers increasingly expect a personalised, seamless experience across all channels, 71% think contact centres are siloed within their organisation and 43% say this negatively impacts the overall customer experience (CX). 

So, ditch the New Year diet. We should be gorging on the feast in front of us. After all, you’d never trust a skinny chef so why trust a skinny sweet shop owner?

5 Essential Ingredients for the Perfect Data Pick ‘n’ Mix

While data collection isn’t new, many organisations still aren’t capitalising on the true voice of the customer. There are several steps you can take to manage the gold mine of sweets, well, data coming in and out of the contact centre:

1. Access data holistically

There’s a myriad of sweets in the shop but they are usually in individual jars. Similarly, you’ll probably find your data comes from multiple places, different silos where the perfect customer experience falls into a black hole.  Aim for seamless data. Moreover, when you add new channels, make sure they are fully integrated with the rest of the systems in your contact centre. A customer should be able to channel surf and if they do end up speaking with an agent, ensure that agent has access to the full journey and associated information captured along the way.

2. Analyse data properly

It’s not just about buying a great analytics tool, you need the right level of human competency to bring it to life. Dedicate the necessary budget to ensure you have appropriately trained resources to help better understand what all that data really means. Start with the wealth of information held in call recordings and post call surveys – is it chatbot containment? Is it agent availability? Is it agent knowledge? Picking up on the loudest customer frustrations and striving to resolve these will have the biggest impact on CX.

3. Actions not words

Over the past few years, the emphasis has moved beyond collection and understanding of data to actions. Make data insights actionable to drive tangible business value. For example, give a supervisor a top 5 list of to-dos that will have the most impact on their goals. This could be as simple as ‘send Fred on a product training course’ because your data has picked up that a customer was frustrated because Fred couldn’t help them.

4. Be a CX driver

Look beyond the contact centre and work with your Marketing, Sales, Product, and HR teams to identify how the voice of the customer can assist them. Currently, only 28% of contact centre managers admit to sharing data outside their organisation on a daily basis – half are only doing it monthly or even quarterly. It’s time for contact centre leaders to drive CX best-practice across the whole enterprise, whilst encouraging their agents to become brand guardians with the power to influence corporate perception, boost customer loyalty and profits using the data-infused sweets in their store.

5. Feast on the right technology

Speech and text analytics are no longer deemed witchcraft (I recall the days where that was a common perception). They are now proven AI-driven technologies, yet only a very small number of contact centres worldwide leverage them. Agreed, they’re not the cheapest of investments and you need a level of associated competency to get the most out of them, but the calorific rewards are enormous. Think about:

• • Operational Efficiency—such as checking for situations that should have been contained within a chatbot dialogue or is a growing potential category for self-service inclusion.

• • Customer Experience—classic examples are checking for active listening skills versus an improvement in customer sentiment or red-flagging when unnecessary call backs are causing frustration.

• • Growth—for example, actively looking for qualified opportunities by assessing an agent’s ability to overcome customer objections to a special offer and then coaching them accordingly.

All of these examples, and the data they unlock, are currently just sat on the sweet shop shelf being overlooked.  You will get value from the latest AI-driven tech, I promise, and I encourage you to at least pencil this technology in for serious consideration in 2023 and beyond.  To identify other gaps and opportunities that contact centres could be missing, download our latest report: “State of the Contact Centre 2022: Empowering the contact centre as brand guardian.”

About the Author

Jim Davies is Chief Experience Officer at Calabrio.

Calabrio is a trusted ally to leading brands. The digital foundation of customer-centric contact centres, Calabrio helps enrich and interpret human interactions, empowering the contact centre as a brand guardian.

We maximise agent performance, exceed customer expectations, and boost workforce efficiency using connected data, AI-fuelled analytics, automated workforce management and personalised coaching.

Only Calabrio ONE unites workforce optimisation (WFO), agent engagement and business intelligence solutions into a true-cloud, fully integrated suite that adapts to your business.

If you’re a business that processes customer data in any respect, you may need a GDPR representative.

According to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), if you’re a UK-based business and offer goods or services to individuals within the EEA or monitor the behaviour of individuals in the EEA in any way shape or form, then you still need to comply with the EU GDPR in respect to data processing.

The UK GDPR has supplanted the duty for businesses that are public authorities or public bodies and use data processing to appoint a data protection officer (DPO). On top of this, organisations that wish to operate and who are involved in data processing activities need representation in both territories—by law.

Since you do not have a base inside the EEA, the EU GDPR requires you to appoint a representative in the EEA. They will need to be set up in an EU or EEA state where some of the personal data you’re processing is located. And you must authorise this representative, in writing, to act on your behalf in terms of your EU GDPR compliance. In this respect, they will also deal with any supervisory authorities or data subjects.

GDPR law and compliance behind processing data

Even though your GDPR representative will work on your behalf, deal with the fine details and relay back to you any important information regarding data processing, it’s still a good idea to understand the law and compliance behind processing customer data in regards to GDPR regulations.

GDPR is a strong set of data protection rules that prioritises individual’s rights over corporations in regards to their consent, control and data activities held by businesses. This includes even the most basic data (information) about an individual that businesses collect, such as names, location data or even a username.

Personal data must be protected against unlawful processing, as well as loss and damage. And businesses require consent and give people the ability to withdraw, request and delete their personal data at any time.

Why do I need a GDPR representative and what do they do?

You need an EU Data Representative if you don’t have an office in the EU but process large amounts of data from EU data subjects (persons and individuals) or if you process special categories of data.

According to Article 27(3) of EU GDPR regulations, these data representatives are:

• Nominated by the controller or processor to be addressed in addition to the controller of the processor by EU regulatory bodies.
• Established in a member state where you process or monitor personal data.

A GDPR data representative performs several important functions on your behalf beyond being a named point of contact between yourself and EU regulators. They also:

• Act on your behalf, for your benefit, with supervisory authorities.
• Help you to meet Article 30 requirements (record of processing activities (ROPA)).
• Supply you with any updates, revisions and new readings of the GDPR rules as they apply to your business.
• Make records available to supervisory authorities.

Your GDPR representative acts as your public face in the EU. As a business, you benefit from having a GDPR representative in that they’re a fast contact point for international bodies to get in touch with. They work on your behalf. They will provide you will timely updates about EU law and the regulatory authorities can bring proceedings against the representative—instead of yourself—for any breaches you’ve committed.

What happens if GDPR regulations are breached?

Failing to comply with GDPR regulations can prove devastating for businesses, corporations and organisations.

Not adhering to or breaking any rules within the stringent GDPR regulations can mean facing massive fines. There are two tiers of fines for businesses that violate GDPR regulations. Companies that breach regulations face a maximum penalty of €24 million ($23 million) or 4% of their annual global turnover (whichever the great). The second tier means Infractions can hit €10 million ($12 million) or 2% of annual turnover. Authorities can also issue public reprimands or place restrictions upon such businesses, rather than issue fines.

If you’re a business that processes large amounts of data but doesn’t have a base in the territories where you do so, then you require a GDPR representative. GDPR regulations can be stringent, and arduous and it can be easy to accidentally breach them. Having a GDPR representative will give you a physical presence within the territories you’re operating in and make sure you remain on the right side of the law. They will act as a point of contact and reference, dealing with any issues that arise on your behalf and help minimise potential headaches.

These days, many small business owners use digital tools to manage virtually every aspect of their company, including key pieces of customer data.

While these digital tools make it much easier and more convenient to manage your business, they can also leave you vulnerable to cyber attacks if you don’t have the proper security measures in place.

Today’s consumers know this, and they are more concerned than ever about the safety of their personal data. Keeping your customers’ data safe and secure is essential if you want to keep their business and maintain a good reputation. Unfortunately, many business owners don’t take steps to protect their systems from these attacks until it is too late. In this article, we’ll talk about ways to keep your customers’ data safe from cyber attacks and why it is so important.

What is a cyber attack?

A cyber attack is an attack against a computer, smart device, or digital network. There are many different types of cyber attacks, including phishing attacks, spyware, ransomware, and many others. These attacks are usually carried out with the intent of getting access to valuable financial or personal information, or getting access to the computer systems themselves.

Cyber attacks have become increasingly sophisticated in recent years, as hackers have had to work to outsmart robust security systems. These attacks can happen to any business, whether you’re an entrepreneur just starting out or a corporation with an international presence.

Why is cybersecurity so important for customer loyalty?

As technology has become more advanced, many customers opt to do their shopping online and use digital services to manage many aspects of their daily lives. In fact, over 80 percent of consumers shopped online in some capacity in 2020. Because of this, consumer data has become extremely valuable. Many companies use key pieces of consumer data to create personalized marketing strategies. However, many cyber criminals seek out these pieces of consumer data for their own financial gain. When they are successful, it can compromise your customers’ privacy, financial security, and even their physical safety in extreme cases.

Today’s customers know how much their data is worth, and they also know what’s at stake if that data is compromised. As a result, they seek out companies with robust cybersecurity systems that protect their data. In particular, they look for companies that communicate clearly and that they can build a trusting relationship with as part of the customer experience.

What are the best ways to protect customer data from cyber attacks?

There are many steps you can take to keep your customer data safe and build trust with them. Here’s what to keep in mind as you are implementing your security system for your website.

• Only collect the data that you need. This may seem simple, but it can go a long way towards building customer trust and keeping that data safe. Many customers are reluctant to provide data, so only asking for what you need is a good way to build trust. Additionally, this will make you less of a target to hackers, because you’ll have much less valuable data in your systems.

• Invest in a reliable security system. Cyber attacks can be very detrimental to your business in the long run, so investing in a good security system now can help you save money. This means investing in a dedicated server system as well as a reliable anti-virus program and updating them regularly. If you aren’t sure where to start, hire a security professional to help you implement this type of system.

• Limit access to valuable data. Only the team members that need consumer data to do their jobs should have access to it. You may also want to limit the types of devices your employees can use to access this type of data. The fewer access points there are, the harder it is for hackers to make their way in.

• Create a data policy and communicate openly about it. Before collecting any data from your customers, put a data policy in place that specifies what type of data you will be collecting, how you will use it, and what steps you will take to protect it. Once you have a policy in place, make sure you stick to it and communicate it clearly to customers. This helps build trust among customers.

Consumer data protection is something that every business should take seriously, whether you’re a solopreneur or an established corporation. Taking preventative steps to keep your customers’ data safe not only protects them, but it also protects your businesses’ reputation and financial security.

About the Author

Ashley Lukehart has been writing about the impact of technology and IT security on businesses since starting Parachute in 2005. Her goal has always been to provide factual information and an experienced viewpoint so that business leaders are empowered to make the right IT decisions for their organizations. By offering both the upsides and downsides to every IT solution and consideration, expectations are managed and the transparency yields better results.

Information has become somewhat of a currency these days: this includes both your data and the data of your customers. Because of how valuable this data can be, hackers keep trying to steal it. As per the latest stats, cybercrimes may cause businesses around $10.5 trillion by 2025 annually.

So, if your business collects user data, you need to implement tough security measures to ensure that it does not get compromised. This is highly necessary if you have a small business, as small businesses are targeted more often by cybercriminals than larger corporations.

To ensure that your customer data is safe, you need to understand how attacks occur. Furthermore, you need to devise some methods to prevent these attacks.

Credential Stuffing

As the name suggests, credential stuffing is an attack that is aimed at stealing employees’ credentials. The attackers use bots to try and guess their username and password combos.

This allows them to gain access to your company’s private information (including customer data), which can be very dangerous for your business if leaked. To counteract this issue, you need to ensure that you and your employees change account passwords on a timely basis. Furthermore, be certain that the passwords everyone uses are strong.

The easiest way to protect customer data and ensure that all business passwords are secure is by providing all employees with a password manager.

Phishing

Computer phising is when someone uses a fake website to trick people into entering their personal information. Computer phishing tricks computer users into typing in the user’s login and password or other personal and business information which can later be used by criminals to steal money from the victims’ bank accounts.

URL hiding is another common type of computer phishing. It involves hiding the destination of links. In some cases, a malicious URL is presented as a legitimate link, causing the victim to click on it.  These malicious links can be targeted at any device, so you need to make sure employees know not to click on them. Phishing attempts can be extra convincing sometimes, so provide some common examples to your employees so they know what to expect.

Ransomware

Ransomware is one of the worst kinds of online attacks that can ruin your company’s reputation. What happens in a ransomware attack is that all of the data on your device gets encrypted, and you have to pay a ransom to get it back. However, you can never be sure that you’ll get the data back.

To avoid such a situation, it’s best for you to keep a backup of all your data in an external offline location.

Out-of-date software

Why do you think you receive security updates for your computer and mobile OS? The most common reason behind this is to curb cyberattacks. If you are not updating your software on a timely basis, your data may be at risk.

Loopholes and bugs in older software versions can provide a clear pathway to hackers. If you still have out-of-date software on your business devices, make sure to update it immediately.

Malware

Malware is commonly targeted at devices through techniques like phishing. If employee devices are not secure enough or employees themselves are not vigilant enough, they will get their devices infected sooner or later. Malware can do all sorts of things: it can steal your data, spy on your activity, or even encrypt your data.

To counter this issue, you need to train your employees not to download any suspicious files on their devices. Furthermore, you should ensure all employees have an antivirus installed on their devices.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are various types of cyberattacks that your business might fall victim to. All these attacks can lead to leaked customer or employee data, and you certainly don’t want any of this information to fall into the wrong hands. Therefore, it is important for you to have a strong security cover and play it safe! Keep all of the attacks mentioned above in mind, along with their countermeasures.

When it comes to protecting the privacy of your company’s data, a VPN is essential. Depending on your needs, it can provide a high level of security to your business and its customers.

What is a VPN?

The acronym “VPN” stands for virtual private network, an encrypted network that extends across the Internet and enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network. It’s like a secure tunnel that brings remote users into your business’ private network. All data traveling to and from your device through that tunnel will be encrypted. Only your device and the site with which it is communicating will have the keys needed to unencrypt and read the data.

VPN Applications

VPN client applications allow you to connect your router, computer and devices to a remote server that hosts the VPN service. A good VPN network will have servers in many geographical locations worldwide to handle the traffic so that users don’t experience delays or dropped connections. Once your traffic is being routed through a VPN server, the IP address of your device or network is replaced by an address being used by that server. Using a VPN network with many servers means that the IP address your device will be using will frequently change, further masking your identity and location.

Business VPN

A business VPN has several advantages. It allows you to share confidential data with anyone you want, while allowing you to keep it private. It can be used for every connection to and from your company network, including emails and storage networks. Files uploaded to the VPN are encrypted and only a company employee with the encryption key can access them. This ensures that any potential hacker cannot access your confidential data. This feature is a must-have for any business.

Protecting Customer Data

Besides securing your network, a business VPN is a great way to safeguard customer data. Businesses are increasingly moving away from the office to work from home, particularly in the contact center industry. When communicating with clients, customer service representatives frequently come into contact with a great deal of sensitive information. Because these interactions are increasingly occurring online, a VPN is an ideal solution for safeguarding your customers’ data.

When customers entrust your business with their private information, they expect you to safeguard it against hackers and other third parties. A reputable VPN is an ideal solution because it encrypts and securely transmits personal data. As a result, third parties and cybercriminals are unable to access it.

For these reasons, utilizing a VPN is an extremely effective method for businesses to safeguard and secure consumers’ data. A business VPN is scalable, which means it can scale as necessary and evolve to meet your needs. It’s also possible to upgrade your VPN system as your company grows.

Accessibility

A VPN also helps you bypass certain geographic restrictions. For example, if a customer in Europe needs help with a product, traveling to your office for training or taking your call isn’t always feasible. Allowing a customer to send questions via email can result in slow turnaround times, and not always successfully answering their questions. A VPN solution makes it possible for you to connect with customers instantly from wherever you are, making your business globally accessible.

In summary, surveillance and data breaches are facts of life these days and with the rise of cloud computing, you can’t afford security lapses that can be exploited by your cyber criminals or unscrupulous competitors. A virtual private network (VPN) is a secure network tunnel that masks and encrypts corporate data from outside threats ‐ giving data-driven businesses peace of mind as they operate and grow.

Many modern businesses rely on third-party tools and services as part of their work operations. This could include using CRM software for customer management, accounting software for business finances, and specialised SaaS solutions for various business purposes.

This can result in company data being spread out across multiple systems, all too often resulting in company’s having very fragmented data. This means missing out on valuable insights into your business data and makes it difficult to find what you need. Enterprise search provides the solution to this, rendering business data as easily accessible and searchable as a web search.

Unify your data sources

Many businesses want to adopt data-driven policies with good reason, but this requires having good data to begin with. Very often this data is spread across multiple sources in various different data formats and any kind of attempt at analysis requires a large amount of manual effort to extract and unite the various sources of business data.

Making this data gathering simple is crucial for businesses wishing to gain real-time insight into their business data. Many enterprise search solutions therefore make this task simple, by coming with pre-built connectors for hundreds of different data sources and formats. This simplifies an otherwise massively complicated and time-consuming data gathering process. It also does not matter what format your data is in, as enterprise search is capable of working with heterogeneous data sources.

Unlock hidden insights into your business

Keeping these data sources separate prevents real-time access and insight into your business data. Enterprise search solutions can both gather this data for you and make it readily accessible to both technical and non-technical staff. Discovering patterns and trends in data requires being able to find and use it, which is why so much effort is put into creating a clean and user-friendly search interface.

Under the hood, enterprise search leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to tweak and optimise search results. Natural language processing (NLP) is used to understand search queries as humans would describe them and helps to deliver the most accurate and relevant results for any particular search. This is because enterprise search is much more advanced than relying on simple keywords.

Enterprise search solutions offer advanced search features that use context and technologies like NLP to analyse, index and deliver search results from across large, heterogeneous data sources. Staff can use the same search interface and receive personalised results that are most relevant to them. This can include factors such as user location, native language, data access levels, role within the company, and plenty more. The highly customisable search results also fully respect all relevant data protection laws.

Optimise your business processes

Making data-driven decisions can help optimize your business processes and aid in maximising productivity. Business decisions can be made based on hard data rather than educated guesses and rough approximations. This can be particularly powerful for businesses with very large historical data sets, as they open up ample opportunity to analyse and discover patterns.

Real-time data delivery provides up-to-date information that can be used to massively speed up data analytics and provide more timely information to staff. This enables companies to be more nimble and agile with their business processes. Data-driven links can be made between staff performance and sales, budgeting and forecasting can use higher-quality data for greater accuracy, relationships and inefficiencies can be identified between different business components, and plenty more.

Cut down on time and effort

Manually gathering and curating data for data analysis is a very expensive and time-consuming process. Finding hidden relationships between different, seemingly disconnected data sources can be very tricky to spot sometimes, even for data scientists. Without having this information available to run analysis on, knowing what is useful and what is not is almost impossible to identify ahead of time.

It is for this reason that enterprise search can often lead to surprising discoveries and insights for many businesses. Most businesses simply don’t know what they don’t know – industry research suggests as much as 60%-73% of all data gathered by businesses goes unanalysed. The cost of time and effort to analyse gathered data is high, so many businesses simply do not do so.

Enterprise search solutions make it much simpler to gather, index, analyse and present company data in a format that is easy to search and access. Having all this information available and putting it to good use can help provide a competitive edge to companies over competitors who likely are not putting their business data to use.

Enterprise search solutions can help businesses gain valuable deeper insights into their business data and processes by making more data available and easily accessible. A user-friendly search UI similar to those used by web search engines makes searching for company data simple, while powerful machine learning and NLP processes take search queries and run them against hundreds to thousands of heterogeneous files to find the most relevant results for whatever is being searched.