Whether you are a new business, or a long-established one, the issue of personal data is one which it is impossible to ignore.
Too often, the negative side of the story is presented when it comes to data protection – the news headlines are often full of gloomy details about businesses that have been fined for falling foul of the law, or who have lost customers in droves because they have been found to be wanting in terms of protecting the individuals’ information they have been entrusted with.
In this blog, we’re looking at data protection from an entirely different angle, highlighting the ways in which complying with the law can be a positive benefit to your business, instead of looking at it in terms of cost and hassle.
We’ve pulled together a shortlist of three ways in which your business can reap benefits from complying with data protection laws (and you might even save money on the way, too):
- If you have good business practices around keeping the information you hold about your customers secure, this will help protect not only their information, but also your vital commercial information. To take one example, your customer list is a valuable asset of your business, and for commercial reasons you wouldn’t want it becoming public knowledge or getting into the hands of your competitors. You wouldn’t leave business cash on unlocked premises overnight, so if you apply the same considerations about security to the personal information you are holding, you won’t go far wrong.
- Your business reputation is key to the success of what you do. Good information handling can improve your business’s reputation by increasing customer and employee confidence in you. After all, the public will remember the horror stories and the negative headlines for a very long time if you get it wrong, and it will affect your bottom line if they prefer to deal with your competitors because they regard you as untrustworthy as far as their personal information is concerned. Get the upper hand and tell them how seriously you treat their data privacy and what you do to protect it: it could be a useful marketing tool.
- Happy customers don’t complain! People are more clued up about their data protection rights than ever, and it has never been easier than it is now for them to report any problems they have direct to the Information Commissioner. Make sure they don’t have cause to (and you don’t have to incur the time, costs and inconvenience of dealing with complaints). It’s also another way of showing your customers that you value their business, and deserve their loyalty.
Contact one of our data protection experts today for a confidential discussion about how your business tackles data protection compliance.