Week #19 – GDPR & the customer experience frontline (part 1)
Whether you have just started your preparations for the GDPR and the forthcoming new Data Protection Act or you feel it’s all sorted, you need to ensure your most important stakeholders – your frontline staff – are prepared. Your customer facing teams mark where your customer experience ambitions are either realised or frustrated. Whether dealing with customers face-to-face in store or in the field, or remotely in a contact centre, they are the face of your organisation. As such they will be the first port of call for customers looking to exercise their new and enhanced rights.
As a bare minimum, you need your frontline colleagues to:
- Recognise a data privacy-related customer request (a Subject Access Request, the Right to Erasure, or a ‘how do you use my data’ question)
- Know what to do as a result
- And ideally, their understanding should be based on a confident understanding of your organisation’s approach to handling personal data, customer data journeys and so on
How you choose to train your people is, of course, a question you are best placed to answer.
If you have an established processes of briefing, training and knowledge management then just make sure you’ve booked your ‘slot’ for new or updated data protection training. And if you want to do this from a customer-centric perspective, then why not start with sharing with your colleagues what their new and enhanced rights will be (www.ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/individual-rights/) before getting into the process detail of what they should do in their ‘day job’ as employees. Conversely, if you never train your staff (yes, there really are plenty of organisations out there that never do!) then a day’s classroom immersion into the minutiae of EU and UK data privacy regulations either isn’t likely to help your colleagues or staff very much – or lead to lots of unintended consequences…
If you’re feeling ill-prepared as to how to design and deliver data protection training for your front line teams then help is at hand. The DMA Contact Centre Council (www.dma.org.uk/communities/contact-centres-council) is hard at work preparing a contact centre training guide, which should be ready in the relatively near future. In the meantime, though, you can make a start by reviewing your GDPR preparations to date and working out what you most need to share with your front line colleagues.
And in a future ‘Just One Thing This Week’ blog we’ll consider how to retain and enhance your colleagues’ data protection knowledge and skills.
