Who Do You Trust?

My stated career aside, I am probably one of the most trusting people you'll meet. My friends would say I'm gullible. So I doubt any of them would be surprised that my relatively unregulated online shopping habits have finally caught up with me.

Last week, I found a mysterious purchase on a credit card I've been using since virtually the beginning of my time as an adult consumer. A little research on my part revealed that not only was it from an online site I've never heard of, but it was for a drug for which I'm not exactly the target market, Viagra. The customer-service representative at my credit-card company was enormously helpful in starting the process to get my $378 back. The data in my credit file told him my problem was legitimate, but in one moment, my online purchasing habits changed forever.

My situation is fraught with irony: On the one hand, someone had enough data to do damage to my credit, on the other, my long-time creditor had enough info to begin damage control. So all is not lost.

That's a key lesson for businesses trying to deepen their customer relationships, said Glover Ferguson, chief scientist at Accenture.

Accenture recently released the results of a study regarding privacy and trust. Not surprisingly, businesses and consumers had very different views. For one thing, more than half of the consumers said they prefer not to deal with companies who have inadequate privacy policies. At the same time, most overestimated the amount of data that businesses actually do collect.

In fact, Ferguson believes most companies don't know nearly enough about their customers and partners. "To me, a much better thing to do would be to look at the personal data and see what you can do on behalf of customers." To yours truly, it's another argument on the side of more effective business-intelligence and data-analytics solutions.

Speaking of arguments, you can find more of my opinions,as they occur to me,on my new Web log dedicated to thoughts about executive moves, channel programs and business-model shifts. Check it out at www.crn.com/weblogs/thebuzz.

HEATHER CLANCY, Editor at CRN, wants to know more about you. E-mail your comments to [email protected].