July 11, 2025
Personalisation Without Penalties: Staying Compliant in a CX-Led World
The idea that the customer is king has long been a key principle in business for good reason. Consumer satisfaction is imperative for firms looking to build brand loyalty among a base of happy, regular clients.
That satisfaction relies on service – something that’s no longer limited to remembering the names of customers when they come in store. In the digital world, customers have come to expect personalisation.
Rise of the Digital Concierge
Brands must now be digital concierges, remembering every customer’s birthday, interests, habits, previous purchases, and tastes while seamlessly using that knowledge across a variety of relevant touchpoints.
This era of hyper-personalisation – highly individualised, targeted customer experiences – has become imperative for brands to embrace. Doing so requires them collecting and utilising more personal data than ever before. However, that presents some challenges.
For online fraudsters, the personally identifiable information (PII) that brands hold is a potential treasure trove. With just a few scraps of data, digital thieves can create false accounts, forge documents, or sell entire identities to criminal networks.
The Threat to Personal Data
That threat is very real. Indeed, online fraud now accounts for over 40% of all criminal offences in England and Wales, regularly inflicting devastating and long-lasting damages on affected individuals.
To crack down on this, the UK government has introduced increasingly stringent regulations that include UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act. It’s a necessary step. However, for brands, every customer interaction and data point – from order histories to payment details – now poses a potential compliance risk, the consequences of which can be eyewatering.
Critically, The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has the power to issue fines of up to 4% of an organisation’s annual global turnover for violations. British Airways learned this the hard way back in 2020, having been hit with a hit with a £20 million fine after hackers stole data from 400,000 customers.
These are some astronomical figures, yet compliance fines are just the tip of the iceberg. The damages that brands may face from data breaches can be far greater, with research revealing that 58% of customers consider brands that suffer data breaches untrustworthy, with seven in 10 stating they would stop shopping with any company that suffered a security incident.
From direct fines to shattered customer trust, figures like these can be anxiety-inducing for even the most data-savvy brands. However, avoiding these repercussions doesn’t mean abandoning customer experience and personalisation ambitions. It simply requires a shift in mindset and the adoption of diligent habits.
Compliance Can Keep Personalisation on Track
Think of compliance as the guardrails that can keep your CX strategy from careening off a cliff. Proactive companies are already building their practices on solid compliance foundations, ensuring that they’re able to protect PII while still reaping the rewards of personalised customer journeys.
To achieve this, the first step is to map your customer data. Where does sensitive information enter your ecosystem? How does it flow between departments? Which third parties have access? Finding the answers to key questions such as these can often unveil compliance weak spots that can, in turn, be addressed.
At the same time, brands should also evaluate their CX technology stacks. The chatbots, CRMs and AI engines that are powering your personalisation efforts may be collecting data in ways that you hadn’t considered. It’s worth checking this to align these solutions with your compliance frameworks.
Embedding privacy-by-design principles from the outset is even better, rather than retrofitting privacy controls later. Either way, the goal is to ensure that your systems cannot misuse data, even if they’re asked to do so.
Align your Employees to Compliance
People can be either the greatest weakness or strongest line of defence when it comes to data breaches and compliance. With various departments having access to PII, from sales to marketing to customer service, it’s crucial to ensure that every individual recognises their role in protecting personal data. To do that, it’s essential to ensure compliance training is engaging – the learnings simply won’t stick by giving staff another tick box exercise to complete.
These are critical steps to take.
Your customers want personalisation, but not at any cost. Give them both the tailored experiences they crave and the peace of mind that comes from knowing their data is in safe hands. That’s the true competitive advantage in today’s customer-centric landscape.
