Zachary Faruque: The Consumer Trust Battleground: How Consent and Preferences Becomes a Competitive Edge

Pearl. Thank you very much. Hi and welcome everyone. I know I am the last speaker today, so I will try and keep this as light as possible. And I promise to try and only mention GDPR once and we'll get it over with early and then, then focus on all the, all the good stuff. But really what I wanted to do was talk to you about what we're seeing in the market. We see trust is a much bigger driver of loyalty or brand loyalty than it ever has been before. And what is behind that shift that we are now seeing? So if we jumped into the first slide and yes, you can see that.

I think the first thing to know is that privacy itself has been around for a long time. It's often forgotten that it is a fundamental human rights, and that means it goes alongside the right to freedom of speech, the right to own your own home.

It has been around for a long time, but if we think about the, the more recent era and where we started seeing the media coverage, really, it stems from the ere directive, which was focusing on E communications, more colloquially known as the cookies law, and why we see all of the banners when we're browsing the internet today, but then came Europe's most successful export as I hear it called quite often now, and that was the GDPR, which introduced privacy by design the six lawful basis for process and personal data. They said subject rights, introduced supervisory authorities.

And then from GDPR, what we've seen is this avalanche of new regulations coming in around the world where countries are, are trying to seek adequacy decisions with the U to ensure that consistent flow of data. We obviously had CCPA in the us. We've just had L G B D come in in Brazil and hundreds of others. I think you could probably take any four letters, put them together, and there would be a regulation either released or incoming that would be covered with that.

But most importantly, one of the things that we saw with GDPR was the introduction of regulated and legislated fines and what this drove was much greater media coverage. So whether we are thinking about Cambridge Analytica, H and M British airways, Marriot, Google, there are countless headlines. There's a new headline every month where, which has made consumers much more aware of our rights in regards to data protection and privacy. But it's not just regulation that is pushing this now and creating this battleground and driving it.

What we're now seeing is industries themselves and businesses specifically pushing even further than the regulations, further driving that importance of trust when we're interacting with consumers, nowhere, do we see this more keenly than within the browser space? At the moment we saw Firefox and apple addressed third party cookies with ETP and ITP respectively. And now the behemoth that is Google in regards to market share have said, they're entirely deprecating third party cookies within the next two years.

That's not a regulatory requirement that's been done by those businesses specifically because of a desire to want to protect their consumers, privacy rights, and ultimately build trust. Now, in building that trust, what they're looking to achieve is increased market share because they know that trust is so important to consumers right now. But if that's the battle battleground, how does consent and preferences come into this? And how do you utilize a good consent and preference strategy to give you a competitive edge?

I think a good way to start this process is to think about it from a con from a consumer perspective. You know, we want to work as consumers with companies that we trust, who respect our privacy, but we also are keenly aware that we want a personalized experience. And so when you take that and put it into a business perspective on one side of the coin, you have the privacy office that is looking to address regulations. We need specific consents, whether that be cookie compliance, marketing consent, we need to look at different consent models, opt in, opt out, double opt in.

We might be collecting acceptance of terms and conditions, policies, and notices. We've also under GDPR, got things like data minimization that we need to address as well. But then on the customer facing side, the marketing side of the business, the customer teams, we are wanting to deliver that personalization. We're wanting to know our customers and provide seamless experiences, but in order to do that, we have to collect more and more data about that individual in order to provide the personalized experience.

So it's often seen as an opposing force within a business, and I'm sure many of you saw it within your own businesses or the wider industries that when GDPR came in marketing distribution lists got absolutely decimated because the marketing teams and the customer teams just weren't ready, but there was a regulatory requirement to put this consent in place. So consent and preferences is about uniting those opposing forces, having a customer-centric approach.

And rather than thinking about as consent and preferences, it's about giving consumers the ability to control and personalize their interactions with a brand. And so ultimately what we're allowing consumers to do is have their cake and eat it. So irrespective of where you are within a consent and preference strategy in your business, generally, there are four key areas that we see most commonly in the marketplace. The first and foremost is about I establishing identifiers.

I, if we're gonna capture lots of information, whether it be regulatory compliance consent, or whether it be, you know, preferences in regards to frequency of communication, types of products, categories, content, whatever that happens to be, we need to tie that to an individual. We need to identify that individual. And I think one of the key pieces that I like to think about when I think about establishing identifiers is yes, it's an identifier from a technological perspective, but what it actually is, is the start of a relationship. And that start of a relationship should be two-way.

I, that is a joint commitment between brand and consumer to embark on a relationship. What it is not about is fingerprinting. I E if you are identifying an individual by fingerprinting, and there are some pretty, pretty clever ways that this is happening at the moment on the internet, you know, from everything from types of fonts, to screen size, to user agent, all of those different things, you know, in silo probably aren't unique, but you tie them all together. And suddenly you have a unique fingerprint on an individual.

Now that's not a two-way relationship, that's not a relationship based on trust. So when you think about establishing, identifies, think about it from the relationship perspective, this is the start of a journey between brand and consumer. The second and third piece really go hand in hand, we look at progressive profiling, and this is all about capturing the right data at the right time. It's not a 300 page or 300 question form for registration sign up because we need to capture all of this data.

It's about capturing what we need when we need it in a contextual manner, so that the consumer can understand why they're giving that information. What is the benefit to them by giving you some more of their information? Omnichannel approach is something that's talked about very widely across many industries. It's about having that seamless and connected experiences.

Not only can I manage my consent and preferences from any of the touchpoints that I can currently engage with your brand on, but on the flip side only have to do it once at one of those touchpoint, I, I can go in and set preferences in the mobile app or via Alexa or via chat bot. And that will seamlessly transfer into the other tra touchpoints as well. I'm not having to continually provide the same information.

And the final piece is probably the most important piece and this I like to call activation and enforcement, because if we're capturing all of this information, if we're doing the first three pieces very well, the only way we get any value out of this and protect ourselves is by ensuring that we are activating and enforcing on that information. And so what I mean by that is there is a much wider technology stack that we'll be using.

You know, it could be identity management systems, CRMs, email marketing, automation tools, third party, VOC surveys, all of those different tools need access to this information. And it's imperative that we provide the information to those tools in real time. So if we dive a little bit deeper on the progressive profiling piece, I think a good way to think about it is about how do we provide contextual experiences. So there's an example here from tide. This is just on their website where they're capturing information from a consumer, but it's very specific information.

And it's very clear to us as consumers, that when we provide this information, we're gonna get something back. So by answering a couple of questions, providing preferences off the back of that, I will get an automated recommendation is the best thing that for me, from a product standpoint, but these experiences, these sort of mini micro experiences that you can build up, don't just have to be for product recommendations. They can drive communication preferences, they can drive content navigation, even they can drive segmentation or improving your segmentations.

They can drive improved and higher conversion campaigns that you are sending out. Cause if we have that preference information from an individual, every email that we send out ultimately costs us money. So what we don't want is a big list, shotgun approach, where we send out millions and millions of E of emails in the hope that that is relevant to one or 2% of the people that we've sent it out to what we're much better to have are smaller, more curated email marketing or distribution list, but with content that is relevant to the individual at that time.

So if I've just had a baby, for instance, then I could go into a distribution list. That means that all of the, that I'm gonna mean need, whether it be Muslims, nappies, PRMs, cots, that all can be distributed to me. And I can be given that information because that's what I care about other key piece is in regards to having a very clear Reen strategy. And this goes hand in hand with progressive profiling. I am still astounded how many brands that I speak to today that will have a sign up for my newsletter or a registration. And in the bottom of that form, they've got, you know, tick in the box.

It's a, it's a regulatory consent. It's an opt-in. And they may have even gone so far as adding some preferences. So being able to choose the channel that I receive the newsletter on, or being able to choose the frequency or the topics that I'm receiving information about. But if I register and I don't provide consent, there's no strategy in place to recapture consent. But if we think about a customer journey, if I'm registering and I'm not registering as part of as checkout prices, I'm just register, registering to the site. I don't know what I want to hear about yet.

I don't know all of the different things that you provide. And actually I need a bit more time on site to identify what areas I'm interested in today, which products I care about, which topics I like seeing, what content do I want from the site. And so if I've not consented, or if, you know, maybe I did consent an initial sign up, but then I've done the unsubscribe link in the email. I've UNS consented post that time. How do we recapture that consent? And contextual reconsent is the best way to go about this, because that is where we provide personalized.

That's where we capture personalization information and preferences that we can really act on and drive and improve experience for both parties, both the consumer and the brand. So as they're going through your website, maybe you have content. And it's just a very simple tick box that says, if you enjoy this content, you can reconsent and we can start sending you this via email. So making sure you have a resend strategy in place is imperative, because otherwise you will have an enormous database of gray inactive users that you can do nothing with.

Now, the Omni channel experience. We, we touched on this a bit earlier, but it is about using all of the technology that's available to you today and ensuring that your consent and preferences strategy feeds out to all of those same touchpoints that you are using. So if you're using a chat bot for customer care, make sure that you are providing the ability for users to subscribe or unsubscribe or access their preferences and manage their preferences, provide information through that chat bot.

If you have an Alexa app, similarly to the chat bot, be able to do it there and have those experiences track across the different devices and environments. I can set my preferences via Alexa. The next time I come to the website, those preferences are did to, and that is tracked across those different environments and in devices. And so the last thing to think about is that activation. And if we're capturing all of this information, we are doing it very well in regards to progressively profiling.

You know, if it's a newsletter, it's just first name and email address. What other information do we need? Just having their surname helpers in any way is a business.

No, it's probably not relevant at that point in time, but maybe when they're checking out, we need their surname. So what are we capturing as we, when we're capturing minimum information, but across multiple different touchpoint, across multiple different devices, that's all being collated. And we have this golden record of an individual, but we then need to downstream this to the rest of the systems that we're working with. Those CRMs, those marketing automations, CMSs identity management platforms, VOC surveys, all of those need that information.

They need it in real time and they need it in real time. Because from a regulatory standpoint, maybe I opt out of email marketing, but there's a batch update that happens once a week or once a day. And in between that person opting out and us sending out the next newsletter that batch hasn't happened. And so now we're, and we've broken trust. And on the flip side, an individual signs up to hear about the latest discounts, but those discount emails go out once a week, they signed up on the Thursday. There's a batch app that happens at the weekend and the email goes out on the Friday.

So they've signed up on the Thursday, but they've missed this week. This week's discounts, which means they're now annoyed because they signed up before. And what they're probably gonna do is call your contact center, which is gonna cost you, you know, three or four pounds per touchpoint. Every time they call up because you're using a third party and it's just an unnecessary stress for the customer. It's an unnecessary cost to your business as well. And so finally, what I want to talk about is the impact.

It's great to talk about these pieces, conceptually, and, you know, within a 1720 minute window, that's unfortunately what it needs to be. But we recently did some research induction with the DMA data marketing association, where we surveyed marketers at all different levels of the hierarchy. And we asked them about their experiences with consent and preferences, what strategies they had in place and what impact they saw to their businesses when they implemented a consent and preference strategy.

And we received a pretty incredible number back for every pound invested in consent and preference management. There was an average return of 41 pounds to the business. That is an incredible ROI. Something like 4000%, but 47% also saw an increase in Optum rates, of course, with that resend strategy. And then 53% of, of course increased revenues. So there is a real, actual, tangible ROI to implementing a fantastic consent and preference strategy. And the other thing I'd I'd call out is that this is not a marketing initiative. This is not a privacy project. It's not a technology initiative.

This is a group cross-functional initiative at the strategic level to do this, right. There's also no silver bullet. You're not gonna buy some software off the shelf and that's it. You've suddenly got amazing Optim rates, reduced opt opt optout rates, and you're fully compliant. It is an ongoing process that takes time. You have to be thoughtful about your customer journeys. What are the workflows? What are the touch points? What data are we capturing at this touchpoint? What information is relevant here? Where can we recapture consent?

How do we do this in an, in offensive UN gregarious manner? We don't want big popups flashing all, all over the screen, putting people off. How do we make it part of the experience in that given touchpoint, but with that, thank you very much for taking the time to listen to me. Any questions.