As time goes on and technology continues to advance, so does the importance of online presence and functionality in a successful business. Constant adaptation is necessary for any business to thrive, and with no certain end in sight to the current COVID-19 pandemic, it’s more important than ever to have a convenient, secure, and user-friendly interface in which to interact with your customers.

With these adaptations comes the additional responsibility of maintaining your customers’ personal information, for the dual purposes of creating a more convenient user experience by showing them the products and services they want to see the most, as well as your own benefit by collecting data on which of your products and services are selling the most, and to which demographics they are selling.

As such, it is of the utmost importance that your customers are able to trust you with any information they need to provide you with, and that means making sure that their data is:

• provided with proper informed consent;
• maintained ethically and securely; and
• as correct and accurate as possible.

In 2018, the European Union implemented the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, as a set of standards with the intention of achieving the aforementioned goals. While they do not necessarily apply worldwide, adhering to these standards is still prudent as a general set of guidelines for ethical data management and storage. In addition, data accuracy can be ensured by a strong validation regimen on anything you receive from customers or clients. This can be accomplished with good database management and business logic on your service’s backend to ensure that you only receive the data that you want and expect, and no more or less.

Regardless of the above guidelines, however, it is still up to anyone providing an online service to go above and beyond these standards to the best of one’s ability in order to ensure that customers can rest assured that their information is in good hands. Not only is doing so ethically correct but is also good for your reputation, which when considering the quickness in which word can travel over social media, can be the difference between success and failure.

Here at OPG, we strive to maintain the trust of our clients by protecting their data through the use of secure file transfer protocols and adherence to strict permissions and policies of data segregation to prevent unauthorized access and ensure that data in our warehouses are only accessible when and where they’re needed. If you’d like to know more about how you can strengthen your bond with your customers through ethical data management, don’t hesitate to get in touch with one of our reps!