Week #3 – About the GDPR and your worklife balance…
If you genuinely are at a loose end over the Christmas break and are desparate for “A Complete Guide to the GDPR” then head over to FieldFisher’s website and download their GDPR App:
Week #2: Know your SARs from your elbow
Here’s a quick, unscientific experiment you can conduct this week*. Call up your contact centre and say you’re a customer and you’d like to lodge a Subject Access Request.
The GDPR & new Data Protection Act – Let’s start at the beginning
If you’re new to the world of the GDPR and the UK’s planned new 2018 Data Protection Act, you may be feeling a bit overwhelmed by conflicting advice, scary predictions and not knowing where to start. To try and help we’re going to start sharing snippets of advice – especially from the perspective of those responsible for delivering their organisation’s customer experience – once a week.
Technology providers – it’s time to wake up to the GDPR!
If you are a technology service provider and have been taking notice of GDPR (the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation) and the new Data Protection Bill making its way through Parliament, then you will be aware that there are changes in the offing. One of those that is likely to be particularly relevant if you handle or process your client’s data or the data they hold on their customers, is the changed status of data processors and data controllers. Currently, there’s a very clear difference between the two. As a data processor, the “my client told me to do it” defence isn’t quite water-tight, but in most cases it will keep you out of trouble.
It won’t do so in future, though. GDPR puts a lot more onus on data processors to be confident that the data they are handling is being used appropriately and compliantly.
So, just something to address from 26th May 2018 onwards, then? I think not.
Contact Centres – 3 More Things You Need to Know About GDPR / the new Data Protection Act
A few months ago, we blogged about 3 things that contact centres and people responsible for customer experience needed to know about GDPR (the new set of EU data protection rules, now being written into UK law in the new Data Protection Bill, which had its first reading in parliament earlier this month). We explained that the DMA’s Contact Centre Council had been considering how contact centres should best square GDPR compliance with optimising customer experience and securing companies’ commercial goals. www.linkedin.com/pulse/contact-centres-3-things-you-need-know-gdpr-steve-sullivan/ Back then we highlighted:
• the possible need for a Data Protection Officer (DPO)
• changing requirements between data Controllers and Processors
• the need to ensure your corporate insure cover reflects changed obligations and liabilities
We said we’d continue to keep you informed as to what we understand about how GDPR will take effect and the impact it is likely to have on customer facing operations.
Since then, although the Data Protection Bill has started to make its way through parliament, some detailed, practical aspects of how GDPR will be interpreted – specifically around customer consent and profiling – remain a little unclear. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)’s final guidance on these areas is still awaited. However, as the ICO has made clear (www.iconewsblog.org.uk/category/elizabeth-denham/), there’s a great deal we can be certain of. Organisations need to get into a fit state before the new DPA makes compliance with GDPR mandatory by May next year And for many organisations, that will be big ask.
So, here are another 3 things you need to know about. There will be more aspects of GDPR / the new DPA to consider in future, but take these on board for now. They will all have a direct impact on your front-line staff, in contact centres, in the field and in-store.
What the Information Commissioner (didn’t) do when she was on her holidays
August is a funny time of year, isn’t it? If you’re not on holiday – and as long as your colleagues’ absence hasn’t meant that you’re up to your eyes in their work – then August can be a great time to catch up on the things you’ve been putting off. Putting in plans for your ’peak’ season, reading some of those thought leadership articles you’ve downloaded and never had a chance to catch up on, swapping your wonky chair with a better one from the first floor, completing that mandatory e-learning course that no-one’s noticed you’ve not yet done, etc.
You could start blogging about your work and your organisation, make a commitment to write a blog every week and (the really impressive bit) actually do so. It would seem to be a strange time to start, though, when a large proportion of your audience is either away from work or distracted from their typical working routine.
However, that’s what Elizabeth Denham, the Information Commissioner, has done this month.
Honda, Flybe, £83,000 & The Information Commissioner’s Office – 3 Lessons for Us All
It’s now over 2 months since the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) fined Flybe and Honda £70,000 and £13,000, respectively, for infringing PECR (Privacy and Electronic Communication Regulations). So, why are these two cases still being talked about? Partly, of course, because it’s very rare that blue-chip brands like Flybe and Honda are subject to Enforcement action – and all the resultant reputational damage – by the ICO because of their customer contact and marketing activities.
But there are 3 wider lessons that stand out and should be considered by marketers of brands big and small.
Contact Centres – 3 Things You Need to Know About GDPR (for starters*)
You may well have read about the impact of GDPR (the new set of EU data protection rules, due to be written into UK law by May 2018) and excitable comments about the potential fines of 4% of global turnover or €20 million, whichever’s the greater.
But isn’t that all a bit over the top? It’s only going to be the real rogues and miscreants who will need to start working out what the current sterling equivalent of €20m is, surely?
Not necessarily.
Where to start in a sea of new Customer Experience Technology
This article was originally published on About Match’s UK website www.aboutmatch.co.uk
The biggest change in the world of contact centre technology over the past several years has been the rise of mobile and digital channels. It’s been a case of “follow the consumer”, as organisations frenetically play catch-up to deploy new technology to feed their customers’ insatiable digital appetites.
Journey’s end – or is it?
Maybe, just maybe, we should all follow JustCloud’s example, start worrying less about sophisticated customer journey mapping and try some old-fashioned customer service.
“Be nice to people on your way up, because you never know who you’ll meet on your way down!” is one of my mother’s favourite phrases. It might be redolent of the days of a more linear career progression, but surely good advice all-round.
An acid test of a brand and how they really feel about customers and how to treat them is when you’re leaving. We talk a lot about customer journeys, but often the most memorable stage is the point of departure. How do we feel about a brand that we’re moving away from – and how does the brand’s behaviour as we end our transactional relationship impact on our future perception?
