Customer data: Protecting your most valued asset

The most valuable assets of retailers are often intangible. Take customer trust. Trust is essential to fostering brand loyalty. It builds stronger long-term relationships and lays a foundation to optimize customer lifetime value.

Data is increasingly among the most valuable assets of all. Data fuels our efforts to provide engaging experiences that excite customers to keep them coming back. It helps today’s merchants foster trust through engagement with customers as individuals.

Years in the making, trust with customers can be fractured in an instant. The same data that enables reputable merchants to inspire customers quickly becomes a target for bad actors. Risks from data breaches, payment fraud and identity theft pose consequences that can destroy trust in an instant, at scale.

Making data protection mission critical

Retailers are collecting, analyzing and leveraging more data than ever about their customers. Protecting that asset is therefore mission critical for merchants to maintain customer trust. A plan to protect customer data needs to demonstrate the responsibility that matches the stakes.

Merchants assume new responsibilities with every byte of data they collect. Virtually all customer engagements leave a record. Those records relate to customers, and they demand stewardship.

A new Worldpay report, Protecting Customer Trust, helps shed light on the growing importance of data security efforts to merchants of all sizes. Our report begins by highlighting how data is being used and why that elevates the protection of data to an existential importance.

Our report examines the risks and rewards of managing data assets in such a high-pressure environment. Finally, we’ll look at the technologies that retailers are using to protect their customers’ data and future trends on the horizon including the use of artificial intelligence.