Are you grasping the moment?

One thing is certain; we won’t forget what we did in these very special Corona Virus quarantine days.

And although none of us know how long our confinement is going to last, we do know that it is going to end.

We are experiencing an unprecedented once in a lifetime chance to do those things we don’t normally do and to get marketing ship shape for when we are eventually let out, and the wheels start turning full speed again.

Freed from the daily commute and the office banter, we can make real progress with the infrastructure and the customer knowledge that should drive marketing, and which is so often ignored when times are busy.

By now you must have started to build a ‘must do when away from the office’ list; and we have a few suggestions of things that you might consider including:

  • finding out which of all your marketing initiatives in the last year actually made you money
  • finishing the unmentionable GDPR project
  • planning future recruitment to avoid black hole areas
  • getting customer data into a single customer view
  • asking customers what they like and don’t like about what you do
  • making sure you have the dashboards you need to steer the ship
  • getting the team to use some of the incredible arrays of free online training resources
  • achieving consensus on the five most important areas to focus once you are free
  • and so on, and on. The list can get very long very quickly

We are here to help; as well as our data science and technology arms, we have a marketing consultancy.  Its aim is simply to ensure that you have the tools and the customer knowledge to unlock the most customer value at the least marketing cost.

If you would like us to help you write or deliver on your shortlist, we are here to provide expert support.

For a quick dip into what our consultancy normally covers, then please click here to view a short PowerPoint.

Hoping that we can help you make the best use of the quarantine.

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

Tech essentials for managing personal data post GDPR

We have tried to keep this at a very high level, but we wanted to share with you our thoughts on the minimum tech you will need:

Please don’t hesitate to make contact if you need help, as we have an affordable, pre-packaged, cloud-hosted solution ready and waiting for you.

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

The far from simple task of responding to a subject access request

What’s the full process and GDPR requirements when responding to a subject access request?

When individuals call into your fulfilment centre, or reach you via email or letter, with a request exercising their rights under GDPR, they will be triggering what is, in reality, a complex process. They may alternatively be directly accessing your on-line privacy portal, using self-service, but the steps that they will follow will be broadly the same.

 

Here’s a 10 step guide to all the process intricacies involved when responding to a subject access request

 

Step 1: Have all your data relating to each individual that your organisation deals with joined together into a single customer view

This will need to include on-line data you are holding like pages browsed linked to cookie IDs, as well as off-line data such as transactions. To make matters more difficult, the personal data may be held in an unstructured form such as emails or reports. It will be far beyond the capabilities of most organisation to have the unstructured data pre-packaged as part of the single customer view, but you will at least need the capability of searching for it.

 

Step 2: Identify that the individual approaching you is who they purport to be

If they reach you by email or letter, you will most probably have a requirement to verify them by checking on some other identifiers you may hold, to avoid handing over personal information to the wrong recipient or making false changes to the information you hold on someone.

 

Step 3: Be able to access what some people are now calling a consent vault

This is the place where all the opt-ins and opt-outs are held. GDPR has defined the information you need to hold about each consent that has been provided, such as how it was obtained and what statement the individual is agreeing or not agreeing to. The consent vault will, we expect, naturally form part of the single customer view. However, as well as holding the individual consents you will need to interpret them so that you can inform Mrs Smith of what, as things stand, you may or may not use her data for. We suggest developing a set of ‘traffic lights’ that work off the consents already provided, and which give clear guidance about what types of activity may be undertaken by which channel.

 

Step 4: Allow Mrs Smith to change her consents

This is going to be much easier if you have the traffic light system as Mrs Smith will have a clear idea of what is in place for her now, and hence what she might want to change. The new consents or withdrawal of consents will need to be data captured and potentially a record of that change sent to Mrs Smith.

 

Step 5: Mrs Smith asks for a copy of all the information you hold about her

A relatively easy step if you have the single customer view in place, but a much more difficult one if you don’t. And then if you have unstructured data referring to Mrs Smith this will also need to be searched. There are technology tools around to help your search process if the amount of unstructured data is very considerable or spread over several different systems.

 

Step 6: Mrs Smith sees her data and wants to correct it

The corrections will need to be data captured and the changes will need to be communicated to any systems that are upstream of where the single customer view is being held. Good practice will, we expect, be to send Mrs Smith some form of notification of the new details you are holding.

 

Step 7: Mrs Smith exercises her rights to data portability

You will then have to provide her data in machine readable format to another data controller that she specifies. We envisage creating an HTML or equivalent file, and sending it to Mrs Smith by email. The data transferred should include not just data provided by Mrs Smith but data generated by you.

 

Step 8: Mrs Smith exercises her right to be forgotten

In this case, you can maintain any non-personal data like transactions relating to her, but you have to delete or overwrite any personal data like email, mobile phone number, postal address, cookie ID etc. As well as deleting them in the single customer view, you will need to inform the upstream systems of the request so that they can do the same thing.

 

Step 9: Take account of Mrs Smith’s requests when it comes to further processing of her data

She may have opted out of profiling, which means that you will not be able to manipulate her data using algorithms to make decisions concerning what you do or do not want to say to her, or what offers you want to make to her. She may alternatively not have provided positive consent to be emailed, so you must not include her in email campaigns etc.

 

Step 10: Maintain an audit trail of what has been done with respect to responding to her subject access request.

We suggest that these actions are most conveniently recorded as part of the information held in the single customer view. In this way, you can meet any challenges from an individual or the ICO concerning how you are managing the GDPR processes.

 

We have developed our own cloud-based technology, called UniFida, to support clients in fulfilling such individual requests.

Contact us if you’d like our help with this.

 

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

Do you know how much duplicate customer records are costing you?

Deduplication may not be the stuff of everyone’s dreams, but it could turn out to be more interesting than you expect. Especially if you are in the dark as to how much duplicate customer records are actually costing you?

 

How many duplicate customer records can you expect to find?

Our rule of thumb is that within any single customer system there will normally be between 5% and 25% duplicates.

However the more ways you have of identifying an individual, the higher the level of duplicates normally uncovered. For instance, if names and addresses can be combined with email or mobile number, many records can be brought together that otherwise would have been kept separate.

There are no rules of thumb however about the level of duplication between different customer systems held by the same organisation; but as an example, our recent work with a media company selling a range of direct to consumer services revealed that for every 100 customer records held across their systems, there were in fact a net 75 individual people.

 

So why does this matter?

Perhaps the most obvious reason is that deduplication will stop you sending two communications to a proportion of your customer base.

Just stop to think just how irritating it is to have to open or delete two emails from the same source with the same content.

And then, if you are using paper and post, there is a big cost implication of not getting the deduplication right.

The second reason is GDPR. How will you handle individuals’ requests to be forgotten when there are two versions of these peoples’ records? And how foolish would you feel when sending customers copies of the data you hold on them when clearly it came from two separate sources?

But probably the most interesting aspect of deduplication comes when you pull data together from across different systems and sources.

Mr Smith who buys holidays, and is on a dating site you run, has a distinct profile; so does Mrs Smith who buys wine and cooking equipment, and so probably likes entertaining at home.

So whether you have a single customer file, or customers spread across several systems, the case for deduplication is clear, but just how clear it is can only be quantified when you have matched all those duplicate customer records together.

To find out more about Unifida can help your business please contact us.

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

Forget-me-not: The right to erasure of personal data

As many of us know, the right to erasure of ‘personal data’ is one of the key elements within GDPR.

But that leaves a big question mark over exactly what ‘personal data’ is, and hence what data is to be erased.

 

What is personal data?

Back in 2007 the European Data Protection Working Party published Article 39, and defined personal data as ‘any information relating to an identifiable natural person’.

They went on to say that ‘a natural person can be identified when, within a group of persons, he or she is distinguished from other members of the group’.

 

What data items uniquely identify an individual?

The ICO recently wrote ‘the more expansive [GDPR] definition provides for a wide range of personal identifiers to constitute personal data’. Here I assume that they are not changing the definition itself, but rather just adding in new forms of identifier, like cookie ID.

So, are we being asked to deduce that if a data item is not an identifier relating to a natural person, it is not personal data?

Assuming that this is the case, there are then two important questions that follow and which need to be answered: when is an item of data definitely not relating to a natural person, and hence something that does not need to be erased and within the remaining population of possible identifiers, how uniquely do identifiers need to point to a single individual to be classed as a true identifier?

Personal data does also need to be about an individual in order to relate to it. The value of a house is not personal data until you relate it to an owner, in which case it tells us something about how rich he is.

Many ordinary transactions for instance would not on their own relate to or identify an individual, but certain ones might do.

To take an extreme example, a sale record in the Land Registry for Buckingham Palace would certainly identify the transaction as being associated with the Queen. But less extreme examples like a pattern of phone calls made at certain times of day could also point to a unique individual.

And although a number on its own is clearly not an identifier, when you put it in the category of a list of customers, each with a customer number, then it definitely can become one.

So the question of whether an item of data does or does not point to an individual will depend on its context.

However, I suspect that GDPR is not expecting us marketers to use GCHQ level intercepts to trace links to an individual, which would then make almost every item of data a potential identifier, but rather expect us to employ simpler and more straight forward ones like an IP address, name or email.

But, at this point a further problem arises, which is that many of these ‘straightforward’ identifiers, like forename and surname, can point to more than one person. When I Googled 192.com I found that there are 50 people called Julian Berry in the UK, so Julian Berry in itself is not a unique identifier until it is associated with other information like his address.

Another experiment we ran was to look at whether through knowing data of birth, outbound postcode and gender you could uniquely identify an individual from a UK wide lifestyle database. And the unexpected answer was that in 70%+ cases you can.

This shows that although each of these data items on their own do not uniquely identify an individual, in combination they do.

So where is this taking us?

 

Identifying personal data to comply with the right to erasure

Data items on their own may not be relating to an individual or unique identifiers, and hence personal information, but that they may become so when associated with other data items. A forename and surname plus an address becomes a unique personal identifier. This means that, when deciding what are personal data, we will need to identify either individual data items that point uniquely to an individual like an email, or groups of data items that in combination may do so.

Data items that either on their own, or in association with other data items on a database, definitely do not relate to or point to an individual, are not personal information. Broadly speaking this will mean that when erasing personal data, we can leave areas like ‘transactions’ or ‘donations’ untouched.

This implies that we will need to do a review of all the data held by an organisation to define what could be, and what could not be, personal data, before setting up the technology to erase that personal data when requested to do so.

And when erasing it, we will need not just to erase the personal data held in downstream systems like a single customer view, but also upstream in source data systems. So this implies knowing where all the personal data about an individual has originated, and where it is currently being stored.

Want to understand more about GDPR? Read our 10 step guide to all the process intricacies involved when responding to a subject access request.

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

Has GDPR ignored the elephant in the database?

So has GDPR ignored the elephant in the database? ‘Personal data’ is defined in GDPR as ‘any information relating to a person who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that person’.

So each of us can be seen as ‘bristling’ with multiple potential identifiers, any or all of which may be stored by organisations using our personal data. And to add another layer of complexity, most of the commonly used identifiers, like email addresses or mobile phone numbers, may change on a regular basis.

All of us, as data subjects, can ask any organisation holding their data,for their personal data to be deleted, or transferred, or not to be used for marketing communications, or for profiling, or sold to anyone else etc. etc.

We may also change our minds about how our data can be used, and most probably forget what we have requested in the first place, because it’s not at all important to us.

So, for example, using our name and address as our ID, we request that organisation X does not profile our data, whilst using our email we ask to have our data deleted, and via our mobile phone number then expect to have our recent order traced.

GDPR tacitly assumes that persons about whom personal data is held can each be recognised uniquely, across all the identifiers they care to use, and as they change identifiers over time; and that from this basis rational interpretations can be made of their instructions.

This is evidently a delusion.

As vendors of a technology to build single customer views we know how difficult the identity problem is. The normal ‘shrinkage’ when we deduplicate a customer base across just say a couple of identifiers is around 20-25%; the more the types of identifier the greater the chance of duplicate records.

The technology we have developed to try to solve the problem is called UniFida, and it approaches the question of personal identifiers in a rather different way. It assumes, correctly, that all our common identifiers like email addresses, mobile numbers, cookie IDs etc. will change over time, and that individuals may have multiple versions of them.

So, it stores a history, for each individual, of all the identifiers it has been able to link. When an identifier arrives at UniFida as part of an on-line or off-line data feed, it searches the entire library of identifiers to see if it can get a match. In this way, it brings as much information about an individual together as is possible.

Has GDPR ignored the elephant in the database? To find out a little more about UniFida please contact us. It may make complying with GDPR a little bit more possible.

UniFida logo

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.