Do You Care More About Collecting Data or Customer Experience?
Joona Nuutinen The purpose of GDPR is to give everyone the ability to choose how much personal information they share. GDPR is a very necessary law with good intentions. GDPR itself didn’t ruin the internet — it was the warped priorities of site administrators, where collecting data is more important than providing a good customer experience. Visitors are immediately told how the site intends to profit from them and asked for permission for the most thorough exploitation possible. If the site administrator’s goal were to provide a genuinely useful service, it could be done perfectly well without collecting user-specific data.
Site profitability improves when you focus on customer experience
The customer journey typically runs from search engines and product research to the shopping cart. This path is full of distractions and crossroads. You’re just one of many service providers, each probably trying to profit from visitors as much as possible — collecting data greedily. One way to stand out is through friendliness and respect for privacy.
The first interruption on the customer journey is the GDPR prompt, which may annoy the customer so much that they don’t proceed to the site at all. Some stubborn privacy advocates spend a lot of time filling out forms and blocking data collection, which also provides a terrible user experience. It feels like being a sheep about to be sheared. What if you focused on customer experience instead of data collection? What if you prioritized the quality and richness of the service?
Anonymous data is enough for service improvement
Anonymous visitor data is perfectly sufficient for improving site usability. It’s not as precise as user-specific data, but it tells you enough about situations where purchasing is difficult. Anonymous usage data that doesn’t collect IP addresses, for example, but rather the most browsed pages, can be collected without separate consent. Service usage can be monitored without consent as long as individual users aren’t tracked.
By prioritizing customer experience, you build a strong brand
The obsessive collection of user-specific data is short-sighted. It may be profitable in the short term, because ads stalking customers across the web eventually wear down their targets, but quick sales often come with a long-term cost to your reputation. If you’ve already told visitors upfront that you want to profit from them as much as possible by asking permission to build a profile for targeted advertising, brand building has gotten off to a tainted start. You’re clearly not on your customer’s side — you’re operating from greed. When customers are treated with respect that shows in everything you do, a positive brand is built and one-time buyers become regulars and advocates.
The world’s most valuable company and perhaps strongest brand, Apple, doesn’t collect personal data on its website. Apple’s site doesn’t ask about cookie permissions or sell your data to shady advertising companies. This doesn’t mean Apple doesn’t know its customers or can’t offer them the right products.