Meet Alice. She’s a data analyst at an eCommerce retailer, heading up a team that uses data analytics insights to improve the customer experience.

Alice’s team analyze browsing history, purchase behavior, and personal preferences collected on the company’s website. They use this information to generate personalized recommendations which improve conversion rates and the customer experience.

This is Raj. He’s a senior executive on the retailer’s leadership team. He’s just been on a call with an external marketing agency who’ve claimed they can significantly improve the company’s personalized recommendations and achieve higher conversion rates.

To do this, the agency will need to combine the company’s consumer data with additional data from other sources. This will enable them to gain deeper insights into consumer behavior on the company’s eCommerce platform.

Raj asks Alice to investigate this proposal to see if it could work, so she contacts the marketing agency herself to find out how they collect and handle their data. She discovers that they acquire data from a third-party source, and it’s not really clear whether that data was collected with consumer consent or not.

Alarm bells start to go off in Alice’s head. Using these data sources would compromise her organization’s commitment to ethical data practices which require clear and informed consumer consent. So, what should she do?

Alice goes back to Raj to explain her concerns and makes her own suggestion. She’s going to do things differently. Her team will research alternative methods to collect the data needed for the company’s personalized recommendation strategy. But, she makes it clear that these methods must ensure data is gathered with consumers’ express consent. That way they’ll be working in line with their company’s ethical standards and comply with legislation.

Alice’s data problem: What went wrong?

About