How do businesses protect customers’ data?

Data security is not optional. It’s a must if you want to keep your business and your customers safe. Today, when you collect someone’s personal information, you’re supposed to follow strict privacy regulations like GDPR and be extremely careful with your actions. Knowing this, how do businesses protect customers’ data?

Some business activities are still potential threats to customer privacy. However, companies come up with all different kinds of security measures to protect what’s vulnerable. There are many system safeguards, firewalls, and encryption techniques that can be the foundation of your data security if tested and updated regularly. The best way to learn some proven practices and tools is to look at how other businesses use today’s technology to secure their actions.

Ways businesses protect customers’ data

Apart from robust privacy policies, external protocols, and strong system security, companies use some less-known practices and tech solutions that provide them with the right data security level.

Cybersecurity training

An effective way to ensure the data will be safe in your company is to train your employees. Hoxhunt is a platform that provides enterprises with continuous security awareness training. It’s a good start if you want to reduce the risk related to personal information misuse upfront.

According to Hoxhunt, 79% of breaches start with an employee mistake, and 76% of businesses experience phishing attacks (through malicious emails, text messages, etc.). By educating your employees about cybercrime and its consequences, you can change their approach to handling customer data, for good.

Phone Number Masking

Ecommerce intermediaries, taxi companies, and car dealers have already started investing in the latest safety solution called Phone Number Masking. In many industries, calling is a go-to way for customers to contact a business. That’s why the ability to track and mask calls provides companies with both valuable information and safety. And more important, Phone Number Masking protects the privacy of both the company and the buyer.

At Apifonica, we developed a way to connect buyers and sellers without exposing their phone numbers to each other. There are two ways to apply the solution:

1. By replacing phone numbers of the customer and/or the company representative with virtual numbers (we call them “masks”). Parties call each other using these virtual numbers instead of the real ones. If a virtual number gets compromised, receives unwanted calls, it can be easily replaced again.

2. By implementing a call-back button on the company’s website. To connect with the seller, the customer clicks the “Call me now” button and types in their number. Call-back triggers a call to the seller, then a call to the buyer, and connects both in 20 seconds or less.

As a result, a company gains a super fast and convenient way to respond to customer inquiries. What’s more, customers’ data stays protected as their real numbers are replaced with virtuals.

Read about 5 reasons you should start tracking and masking calls.

Specialized software protection

It’s rather unusual for a company not to have some sort of security software. However, it’s good to mention that the spectrum of these solutions is quite broad. To ensure compliance with the data protection policies, consider enforcing them through the deployment of specialized Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools.

DLP is a set of tools and processes that ensure that sensitive data is not lost, misused, or accessed by unauthorized users. They can control both data within the network and data transit. DLP allows organizations to transform company policies into rules and definitions. On this basis, data can be blocked from the transfer, deleted, or encrypted when found on an unauthorized user’s computer.

Now it’s time to take care of your customers

As you can see, if you want to keep customers satisfied with the level of data security, you’ll find a way to achieve it. Companies failing to develop an effective strategy are likely to lose both business opportunities and users. That’s why it’s crucial to stay up to date with the newest safety solutions and find a tool that corresponds to your business activities. Remember about regular updates, testing, and evaluations of your solution to not end up with an obsolete security system.