Not a day passes without the news of some major or minor cyberattack from around the world, and the cybersecurity companies are not tired of letting all stakeholders know how critical it is to secure their websites, software programs, applications, and other products.
But very few seem to appreciate and listen.
One question that crops up is how does a product’s marketing efforts get affected if there are vulnerabilities in the product’s ecosystem? Additionally, what if, in the process of providing an immersive customer experience, you end up compromising the customer’s security in any manner?
The answer must be quite substantial for the first question and very serious for the second. Here are some reasons why.
If You Wish to Retain Your Customers, You Should Prioritize Their Security
There is enough research material to indicate that customer loyalty could be highly evaporative; here now and gone tomorrow. And whatever business you may be running, competition is always breathing down your neck and they can simply take away your customer with a better offering.
Here’s where most online businesses commit the error. The general misconception is if your app or a product you are selling online is quite useful to the customer and is reasonably priced, your customers will have the best experience and will be with you forever. But, if the customer were to find that just after visiting your site, they start receiving messages on their phones or emails offering an array of products and services they never sought, they will understand that their personal details went from your end where you had captured the data. The customer may never return to your site to do business.
Security is not only important for you but you must make the customer know that you have taken adequate steps to protect the data you store on your site. Remember the good old advice on customer retention and how to acquire a new customer—it takes six times the costof retaining an existing one. And negative perceptions or bad experiences are spread much faster and widerthan positive feedback.
Myth About Customer’s Expectations
A study conducted a few years ago by Walker Info, a company that specializes in the areas of customer experience (CX), has now been updatedwith refreshed details on the evolution of the CX paradigm, which has led to many old myths being thrown out of the window.
As briefly mentioned in the previous paragraph, most businesses run with conventional wisdom still believe that customers leave in pursuit of cheaper alternatives and if they can offer a functional product to their customers and keep prices low, there can be no better solution to their business.
But the study by Walker smashes this theory. According to them, customers are willing to pay more if they believe they are receiving a better product. The way it is described is that from what is known to be a “customer-focused” business model that you have been adopting, the new mantra is to be “customer-committed.”
Now, the meaning of this has many dimensions to it from both the marketing perspective and the customer experience perspective. One of these dimensions will definitely be the level of security put into developing your websiteor application, where you expect your customers to share their personal data.
Hackers’ Behavior Factored in Too
When discussing data security, one cannot keep concerns about hackers out of it. The best of cybersecurity firms and experts are caught unaware every once in a while at the kind of malware being developed and methods of cyber attacksprecipitated by the hackers.
One of these ingenious methods is the use of vulnerable apps to get at the end users. The weaker your application or your website is, the riskier it becomes for the customer even if they did not share any data on your website. Merely visiting your website could be exploited by the hacker to gain unauthorized entry into your customers’ system.
In summary, you cannot ignore security while strategizing on offering better customer experience.
