Implementing Digital Trust in the Digital Transformation Era
The demand for digital transformation is driven by organizations’ desires to satisfy the ever-changing customer needs. In addition, customers nowadays entrust businesses with their personal and sensitive data as everything has been digitalized. Therefore, digital trust is a key aspect that is used to measure its success. But, what is digital trust anyway?
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Digital Trust
Digital trust is described as the measure of customers, partners and employees’ confidence in an organization’s ability to protect, store, and secure its sensitive information. Another definition provided by the World Economic Forum is that digital trust is individuals’ expectation that digital technologies and services — and the organizations providing them — will protect all stakeholders’ interests and uphold societal expectations and values.
Is Digital Trust Crucial in this Digital Transformation era?
The answer is absolutely yes.
Establishing digital trust through strong data security practices, transparent data handling, and privacy protection fosters customer confidence. Digital trust is about being trustworthy, transparent, and providing excellent customer experience rather than simply having a secure web or app. This entails putting security measures in place to protect against cyber attacks, being open and honest about how customer data is gathered and used, and making sure that all online interactions are simple and frictionless. When customers trust that their data is safe and well-managed, they will keep using your product and recommend it to others.
4 Pillars of Digital Trust
According to Deloitte (2015), there are 4 pillars of digital trust that needs to be implemented in the organization.
- Transparency and Accessibility
The foundation of digital trust is transparency. Customers demand full disclosure of a company’s business operations, including how their personal data is used, shared, and protected. Businesses should make their services, terms and conditions, privacy policies, and any applicable limitations and restrictions readily visible and accessible to the public to increase transparency
2. Ethics and Responsibility
Digital mistrust can be generated through unfair business practices and improper use of technology. Companies should implement ethical business practices and publicly display them to show customers that they can be trusted. In this sense, building digital trust requires personal accountability.
3. Privacy and Control
Customer information is crucial for developing customised products and services. While there may be a desire to use personal information without permission, this is also one of the biggest risks to digital trust. Customers should be given the freedom to access the information that has been gathered on them, understand how it has been used, and delete it if they so desire.
5. Security and Reliability
Security and reliability serve as the last pillars in building digital trust. Because of the constant risk posed by cyber threats, organizations must use the most recent tools, technologies, and procedures to secure both their own data and that of their customers. Building digital trust requires demonstrating security and dependability, whether through communications or externally verified certificates.
How to Build Digital Trust in the Organization
- Implement AI-based data monitoring
Use AI algorithms to discover missing or unexpected data while simultaneously validating data accuracy, validity, and reliability in real-time. This will guarantee that information is used as intended and support maintaining trust.
2. Explore the potential of blockchain
Apply blockchain to smart contracts, digital fingerprinting, identification, and other areas to enable digital trust. Use quantum-resistant encryption methods and maintain crypto-agility to overcome technological limitations and ensure trust.
3. Create strong policies
Companies should establish clear privacy policies that detail how customer information is gathered, stored, and shared with third parties in a way that upholds confidentiality and trust. Customers should be made aware of these rules in advance so they know what data is being gathered and why.
4. Have clear procedures for incident response
To respond to cyber threats effectively and with the least possible impact on business operations or customer experiences, organizations must have clearly defined response plans. These strategies include procedures for risk mitigation, incident reporting, system restoration.
5. Invest in talent and infrastructure
Invest in people to create and implement digital-first strategies, such as AI-based monitoring and trust-enabling blockchain technologies. Invest in infrastructure as well to guarantee that your organization has the tools and procedures required to maintain digital trust.
As customers may be concerned about the security of their data, digital trust becomes the foundation of a lasting and meaningful relationship between businesses and customers that might lead to business growth.
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