As data sources and usage grow, it’s essential for organisations to detect, mitigate and minimise the risk associated with sharing first party data across the technology stack. Customer data is essential to delivering an exceptional customer experience. So, marketers would do well to consider infrastructures and tools that support privacy and compliance by design.

Your customer data comes from any and many sources (web, mobile applications, IoT, servers, kiosks, and offline sources). Imagine the ease of use for your teams, if you had one place to collect it, clean and organise, and activate it across all the marketing and analytics tools you use to power customer-first experiences.

To achieve this, marketers need greater visibility and control over the data supply chain. This means utilising the tools, infrastructure, and adopted practices to be confident that the data is trustworthy and protected by the most stringent requirements. On the flip side, unmanaged tags or data that does not follow standardised data definitions, can make it difficult to control the exchange of potentially sensitive information. It can get increasingly complex for multi-national organisations that must keep track of and comply with the latest privacy protection standards and regulations across the world.

For modern customers, who prioritise their right over their data more than ever before, enterprises must be quick to offer easy options to opt-out whenever they choose. On the backend, this takes a connected system that ensures such customer data is supported and scratched from other layers in the stack that may be plugged-in or controlled by third-party vendors. This can be done by setting preconfigured permission sets and placing tagged data into separate security tiers based on role.

The benefits for using a sound data layer approach to data collection are many; operational efficiency, brand trust, enhanced engagement and compliance confidence are just the beginning.