In today's digital world, businesses have a myriad of ways to connect with their customers and gather insights. From websites, marketplaces and mobile apps to email campaigns, Whatsapp and social media, each platform plays a crucial role in capturing customer data. Whilst each channel is a new opportunity to engage and delight your customer, managing and unifying customer consent across all these platforms can be a real headache. With data privacy laws gaining more teeth, getting a single view of customer consent is not just a technical challenge but a compliance must-have.  

So why can this pose such a challenge? And what can we do about it?

The juggling act of multiple data sources

Think about all the ways to collect customer data. The websites and apps you use everyday track browsing habits, email campaigns log engagement, and social media monitors interactions. Each of these platforms probably has its own system for obtaining and storing customer consent. This creates a messy patchwork of consent records that can be tough to manage.

Different platforms use different terms, structures, and storage methods, making it a real challenge to standardise everything. And without a single, accurate view of consent, you risk using outdated or incorrect data, which can lead to non-compliance and erode customer trust.

Consent preferences also change over time, adding an additional layer of complexity to the challenge. Accurate time and date stamps held in a centralised database allow you to track these changes and ensure that your business adheres to the most current consent status across all platforms.

Tackling technical and organisational hurdles

1. Data Integration: Bringing together consent data from various platforms requires robust integration techniques. You need to ensure that data flows seamlessly from different sources into a single repository. This often involves using APIs, data connectors, and middleware.

2. Data Consistency: It’s crucial to keep consent data consistent across all platforms. If a customer withdraws consent on your mobile app, this change must be reflected on your website, email marketing system, and any other relevant platform immediately. Time and date stamps help synchronise these changes accurately and are essential in the pursuit of a single view of consent.

3. Data Governance: Effective data governance practices are essential to manage the lifecycle of consent data. This includes clear policies for data collection, storage, processing, and deletion. A solid data governance framework ensures that consent data is handled responsibly and in compliance with regulations.

4. Organisational Coordination: Achieving a unified view of customer consent requires teamwork. Marketing, IT, legal, and compliance teams need to collaborate to develop and implement a cohesive strategy. This ensures that everyone knows their role in maintaining data accuracy.

Smart Solutions and Best Practices

1. Centralised Consent Management: A centralised data management system can be a game-changer. It acts as a single source of truth for all data, providing a consolidated view of customer preferences across all platforms. Plus, it ensures consistent and timely synchronisation of consent changes.  

2. Privacy by Design: Adopting a privacy-by-design approach means integrating data privacy considerations into every aspect of your business. This ensures that customer consent is obtained and managed transparently and securely from the get-go.  

3. Regular Audits and Reviews: Conducting regular audits and reviews of your consent management practices helps identify gaps and areas for improvement. This ensures that consent data is accurate, up-to-date, and compliant. Not fun, but MUCH easier if you’ve covered off points 1 & 2.

4. Transparent Customer Communication: Being clear and transparent with customers about how their data is collected, used, and stored builds trust. Providing easy-to-use tools for managing consent preferences and offering straightforward options for withdrawing consent empowers customers and enhances their control over their personal data.  

Getting a single view of customer consent across multiple data capture platforms is no small feat, but it’s essential for staying compliant and building trust with your customers. By using a centralised data integration tool and harmonising your consent capture across all points of customer interaction, you can navigate this complex landscape. Incorporating accurate time and date stamps on consent changes further ensures compliance and accountability, providing a clear, traceable record of customer preferences.

The Data Refinery is an automated data integration system that can streamline your data into a single view of the truth, and that includes consent. We’ve done just that for Yorkshire County Cricket Club by integrating its Email Service Provider, and social channels to inform their view of customers consent across all platforms.  

A key aim for Yorkshire was to be able to get a full picture of consent – knowing that the customers they believe are opted-in have in fact done so and not opted-out later, through a different channel. Getting an accurate view of consent through the Refinery was, in the client’s words, ‘a game-changer'.  They are now using their contact data with confidence to segment fans for marketing campaigns and personalise communication with the fanbase.  

We recently onboarded Yorkshire County Cricket Club, take a read on how we did it here.