Royal Mail urge companies to improve data protection ahead of GDPR

Royal Mail Data Services has published a new report to help businesses rework their customer engagement and data management strategies in the lead-up to the enforcement of GDPR in May 2018.

The new Insight Report outlines how the GDPR requires all businesses to take every reasonable step to ensure that inaccurate personal information is either rectified or deleted.

The report also explains why the volume of available, permissioned third-party data may shrink under the GDPR, putting the onus on marketers to work with trusted data providers to ensure their communications are well targeted and permissioned.

The Insight Report draws on findings from recent Royal Mail Data Services research, which revealed that 40% of organisations either have no plans to, or don’t know how they will, adjust their data practices for GDPR compliance.

The research also revealed that the average cost of poor-quality customer data to UK organisations is running at six per cent of annual revenues.

With a focus on improving the quality of customer data, the Insight Report discusses why data quality is such an issue for today’s businesses, the impact of the GDPR on the use and management of customer data, and how organisations can use the regulation as a catalyst to improve marketing performance.

Jim Conning, Managing Director, Royal Mail Data Services, said: “For too long, marketing performance has suffered at the hands of poor-quality customer data. At a time when customer acquisition and retention is such a challenge for marketers, it’s worrying to discover that nearly 40% of organisations lack any formal process for cleansing their data, and almost 20% do not validate customer data at the point of data capture.”

Conning continued: “GDPR is the perfect catalyst for organisations to tackle the data-quality issue head-on. By regularly cleansing and enhancing internally held customer data with properly permissioned and compliant third-party data sourced from trusted, reputable providers, marketers will be in a stronger position to improve the performance of their campaigns.”