3 Tips For Protecting Customer Data

You are currently viewing 3 Tips For Protecting Customer Data
3 Tips For Protecting Customer Data

Ensuring that your customer’s data is protected is vital for one very important reason: your business is dependent on it. Cybercrime is huge and more businesses than ever before are being affected. Cybercriminals make their money through the acquisition of data; essentially, they hack systems, steal sensitive information, resell it on the dark web, and sometimes hold it to ransom to get the victims to pay for the return of their data. 

As cybercrime shows no signs of slowing down, you must do as much as possible to protect your customer’s data from cyber attacks. Do the marketing for an eCommerce website. As you rely on custom data and analytics as a way of better understanding behaviors and needs to support your marketing efforts, you should look into how you can better protect your customers from the threat of scammers or hackers.

3 Tips For Protecting Customer Data

Understand The Data You’re Dealing With

Before you can do your best to protect customers’ data, you first need to understand exactly what data you will be dealing with. Get to grips with what data your website is collecting, what it is being used for, and where it is being stored. You also need to know whether this data is being passed on to third parties. 

Remember, data is typically accessible on all employee’s devices who also work on the website too, so knowing this will help you to understand what data needs protecting and helps you work out the risk profile of the website. 

Choose To Only Collect Vital Data

If you focus on only collecting the data which is important to your website and marketing strategy, then this will help to:

    • Decrease the value of any stored data
    • Improve consumer confidence

Decreasing the data value helps keep your website more secure, as hackers are less likely to steal low-value data. For example, if all cyber criminals have to gain from you is a list of client or customer email addresses, they may not see the value in this data. But on the other hand, collecting data such as names, phone numbers, and home addresses become more appealing and vulnerable to cyber-attacks. 

On your website, look to only collect vital data required for customer experience. This helps to increase consumer confidence as if you’re collecting data that doesn’t seem necessary to customers; this could lead to a loss of faith. For example, if customers see a form with a vast number of form fields, this could cause customers to question what your company needs that data for, and with each form field a customer needs to fill out, the less likely they are to make a conversion. 

Appoint Someone To Oversee Data Protection

Appoint someone in your marketing team to oversee all data protection practices for your website and carry out regular reviews on the storing and handling data. By regularly reviewing the practices used, you can identify any potential downfalls that potential cyber scammers can take advantage of.

If you are a small eCommerce business, this shouldn’t take too long and can be done monthly along with any regular reporting. However, suppose you’re a larger eCommerce business. In that case, you might want to consider investing in business cyber security services to ensure that all areas of your cyber business security are covered, and best practices are followed. This is particularly important if you collect and store large amounts of customer purchase data daily. 

3 Tips For Protecting Customer Data

eCommerce FAQs

Passionate advocate for digital inclusivity, leading the charge at Understanding eCommerce to provide web accessibility solutions for businesses and organizations. Committed to making the online world accessible to all.