Data Regulations with national reach like South Africa’s POPIA and Brazil’s LGPD, state-wide reach like California’s CCPA and multinational reach like Europe’s GDPR are already mainstream, to the extent where broad scale adoption by organisations has progressed and companies have growing skills and competency in adhering to policies and programs.

Data Privacy and Protection was always considered a CEO and CFO discussion – with financial penalties making headlines for data breaches. As an example, Amazon’s €746m penalty topped the charts in 2021 due to consent management discrepancies related to cookie collection on web browsers, and the fine was nearly three times larger than that of WhatsApp the same year, who faced a €225m penalty for a lack of clarity around their data processing practices in their privacy policy.

But is the accountability and business relevance of data privacy and protection changing offices within the C-Suite? While financial risk is always a business concern, could the shift occurring in our now post-pandemic era of business be to the Chief Customer Office?

The shift to loyalty

Pandemic-era consumer behaviour dropped substantially around the world in 2020 and saw partial improvement during 2021. What has changed though, is the prioritisation of certain categories of spend and the shift away from brand alignment in favour of pricing, convenience and other factors. A  delves into one convenience factor, where 60-70% of US consumers in 2021 were shopping in a more omni-channel manner, with social media as a new channel. Brand alignment or loyalty was also impacted by poor stock-on-hand, with over 60% of consumers facing this situation and only 13% being willing to wait for stock to arrive.

Consumer preference has evolved. Relationships with new brands continue to be spawned out of need, interest, spite or frustration. Convenience, frictionless buying and accurate delivery are expected. What brands cannot afford to do now is give consumers a reason to look somewhere else, and the discussion around data privacy, consent, personalised communication and data protection is now a key priority for the most senior executive accountable for customer engagement, customer experience, and customer success.

The attention of a single customer is a hot commodity in the current era of business. The typical new eCommerce customer experience starts at a social media platform, follows a click-through buying process from a sponsored ad or post, requires the customer to select (and deselect) cookie tracking options, and hopefully not get distracted before completing an order, with convenient payment methods that favour the customer. Inject any notification or pop-up from another brand along the way and your customer journey needs to ensure that you remind that customer of their abandoned basket and offer them a limited time discount to come back to the store to complete their order.

This is the current expectation… but improve this through accurate understanding and prediction of their buying preferences and behaviour and you stand a good chance of closing that order and getting repeat purchases. Mess this up and you’ve lost the opportunity. Add a privacy concern, data breach or any friction in the consent management process and you’ve likely lost that customer for life.

Outlook

Financial risk associated with data regulation infringement is obviously still a priority. No business expects to face multimillion Euro penalties in any given financial year, and this would be a hard knock to both the bank balance and the brand’s reputation. Perhaps, to the CFO, this becomes more of a contingency and the likelihood of facing a penalty becomes more commonplace.

The shift in terms of strategy and competitive advantage with regard to data privacy and protection is arguably sitting with the Chief Customer Officer going forward. Customer journeys, customer insights and customer campaigns should always include an element of sense-checking compliance with regulations, even if the tick-box exercise returns the same results each time. Customers have less appetite to force alignment with particular brands. Even in the banking sector, where customers traditionally have held accounts for decades,  for 2022.

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As the country hardest-hit by the coronavirus on the continent, South Africa has been regrettably slow with its vaccine rollout, with only having received a vaccine dose at the time of writing this.

A first phase, which focused on healthcare workers, concluded in mid-May, and the second phase targeting the elderly and other vulnerable groups, including teachers, is currently underway.

The vaccination of the South African population against SARS-CoV-2 is the most ambitious and far-reaching healthcare initiative in the country’s history, and continues to stretch the limits of our healthcare sector.

Much has been said about the slow pace of vaccine procurement and challenges with convincing parts of the population to vaccinate – thanks in no small part to the extraordinary disinformation campaigns flourishing on social media.

However, one somewhat forgotten aspect risks being lost: the importance of data, and the protection thereof, in building trust in the process.

Optimal usage and protection of patient data

Personal health data represent a particular challenge in terms of data security as a failure to protect such data could severely harm people and expose them to discrimination.

For example, inadvertently sharing sensitive personal health data of a person living with a dread disease could affect their job prospects and livelihoods. A mix-up in personal health data could lead to someone receiving the incorrect diagnosis or, even worse, the wrong treatment. This can be life-threatening under some circumstances.

The Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), which was finally implemented in full force in 2020, aims to give citizens greater control over how their personal data is stored, processed and used.

While all businesses that work with private data – including that of organisations and other juristic persons – are affected, it is arguably the healthcare sector that is under most pressure due to the ongoing pandemic and the unprecedented vaccine rollout effort.

Where is my data anyway?

The vaccine rollout in particular poses an immense challenge in terms of data security and privacy protection. Any clinic, hospital, private or public healthcare practitioner, medical aid or medicines firm needs to ensure they protect the personal healthcare data processed during the course of business.

This is easier said than done.

While government has taken steps to centralise the scheduling and rollout of vaccinations via its Electronic Vaccination Data System (EVDS) portal, and require that all citizens wishing to be vaccinated register on EVDS. The intention is that, as each population group (over-60s, teachers, healthcare workers, etc.) registers, each person receives communication with the time, date and location of their scheduled vaccination appointment.

However, the system is often unreliable, and many people simply get no confirmation of where they need to go or when. There is also little communication over the status of an application for vaccination.

Compounding the problem is that actual vaccination sites are run by a combination of public and private sector organisations, and in many cases are open to walk-ins who may not have received confirmation of their appointments.

How is the data of walk-ins, for example, collected, stored, processed and managed? Who is overseeing the full end-to-end process to ensure it is fully POPIA compliant? In the case of manual data entries, how is quality maintained to ensure data integrity? And how is this data secured from the rising tide of cyberattacks besieging South African organisations?

The role of technology

Public and private sector healthcare organisations should lean heavily on technology to assist with both the protection of vaccine patient data as well as better supporting the end-to-end vaccination process.

A patient experience management tool can give healthcare decision-makers insights into underperforming or misaligned aspects of the vaccination process – for example, insufficient communication around vaccination appointments – and help ensure a seamless process from start to finish.

A cloud-based analytics tool can help integrate healthcare data from public and private sector roleplayers and highlight critical insights that can point to trends, risks, opportunities and areas for improvement while maintaining data integrity throughout. Equipped with accurate and complete data, government and other decision-makers will be able to determine the most effective healthcare response and potentially save lives.

In addition, any vaccine rollout strategy should include a comprehensive customer data strategy, which helps to safeguard the longevity of each organisation involved in the vaccination value chain. Such a strategy should include relevant digital platforms that can ease or enable the process of managing patient profiles, and help manage access and authorisation to systems that provide self-service options for activities such as booking vaccination appointments or tests.

In terms of POPIA compliance, all organisations should have taken steps by now to ensure they meet the requirements of the Act, especially since the grace period for sanction and fines for non-compliance expired at the end of June. Implementing an effective cloud-based customer relationship management tool enables healthcare providers to have a unified view of each vaccinated patient, and gives them the power to limit how that information is used or even delete it (in line with the requirements of POPIA) if needed.

Critically, the customer data strategy should provide individuals with the power of consent to subscribe or unsubscribe to correspondence, manage their preferences for ongoing communication, and afford them the right to be forgotten.

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