Securing Customer Data in the Age of Digital Experiences

When it comes to providing or accessing information, modern customers have extremely high expectations of a brand. They don’t want to repeatedly enter the same data when they set up an account. They want to be able to do business on any device at any time. They want instant access to information about past interactions. They don’t want to wait for anything. And they certainly aren’t going to print anything out on paper.

Today’s businesses are operating in a new era. It’s easy to attract a buyer with a smooth, polished app or website, but it’s just as easy to lose a prospective customer to a smoother, more polished competitor. With so much business done digitally, it’s possible that new buyers are comparing multiple options in side-by-side tabs or apps.

That type of competitive environment is perfect for innovators who want to build a powerful network of connected digital tools to meet the needs of technology-savvy customers. But that system brings with it the threat of security failures that could expose vital information to internal or external threats. Walking the line between customer experience and data security is difficult, but modern technology offers tools to help your team find the right balance.

What modern customers want

When it comes to attracting and retaining modern customers, how they buy is just as important as what they buy. Salesforce research on customer expectations shows that 4 in 5 customers consider brand experience to be as important as the product or services that are bought.

Perfecting those interactions comes down to a few critical descriptors: instant, digital and easy. The best customer experiences will empower users who want to be able to research and buy things from whatever device they're using on the living room couch, at their office desk or even during their commute. They also simplify routine band interactions like changing account information, looking up past purchases or reaching out to customer service.

In some cases, customers may want to manage the entire experience on their own. In others, they may want to initiate a phone call, email or chat with a company representative. Your team needs to build a process that provides a uniform experience across any combination of channels and any number of interactions.

The organizations that do this right are already pulling ahead of their outdated competition. Customers are proving that they’ll pay more for efficiency and convenience. Those simple, digital experiences are winning new customers, encouraging repeat business and even creating promoters.

Securing your agreement process to protect against new security threats

The key to creating easy brand experiences is trust in the agreement process. Part of the convenience of modern transactions is the seller’s ability to securely store extremely valuable information about customers. When your users give you business, they’re trusting you with their personal details, their payment information and a lot more. Lose that trust and you’ll lose their business.

As sellers move into the digital-first marketplace, their cybersecurity profile changes too. If an organization shares information across systems and makes it available to users in any location, there’s also a risk that malicious or unauthorized individuals will be able to access that information.

Unfortunately, this broader shift has made data breaches commonplace. In just the last 12 months, several high-profile organizations have had prominent security failures—Apple, Meta, Twitter, Dropbox, Uber, American Airlines, the U.S. Department of Transportation and T-Mobile, to name a few. These breaches are happening so frequently that regulators are noticing and taking action. For example, the SEC's updated requirements give public companies only 4 days to disclose cybersecurity breaches.

While these security breaches may be fairly common, they’re not unavoidable. With cutting-edge security features, your team can protect the agreement process for all users. Here are four ways to increase your protection against internal and external cybersecurity threats:

• Use products that adhere to stringent security standards: In general, your data is as safe as the weakest link in your technology stack. By building a toolkit full of technologies that meet the strongest standards (GDPR, ISO 27001:2013, PCI, FedRAMP authorization, etc.), you can make sure that your information is as secure as possible.
• Centrally manage users and accounts: Admins need to be able to oversee all people, and technologies that have access to organizational data. With just a few clicks, they should be able to update permissions and access either in bulk or at the individual account level. As your team grows, you may need multiple accounts to manage different use cases or lines of business. At that point, it’s even more important to have powerful central management.
• Protect access with identity solutions: With users logging in to your system from all over the world at any time, an agreement system needs to verify the identity of each of those people. Sometimes that means more than login and password credentials. The most advanced teams can verify identity in seconds using government IDs, knowledge-based authentication, external devices and more.
• Detect and respond to unauthorized activity: Internal attacks on your organization’s information are rarer than external ones, but more costly, averaging 10X more compromised records. Security teams need to be able to identify unauthorized activity and quickly act to minimize damage.

DocuSign products to secure agreement information

If your team is looking to improve security in your digital agreement process, here are some DocuSign products to consider.

• ID Verification: Embed advanced identity verification in your agreement workflow with capabilities such as AI-enabled biometric liveness detection, verification of most government-issued ID documentation, knowledge-based authentication or electronic ID verification.
• Admin Tools: Centralize management of users, accounts and single sign-on (SSO). Protect and manage corporate assets with the security of SSO, domain-level controls and the administration of all corporate users from a single user interface. Search for a user across accounts and domains, then manage that user's permissions centrally.
• Monitor: Track all behavior in near real time to identify unauthorized or unusual activity as soon as it happens, including web, mobile and API activity. Monitor can detect potential threats, help investigate incidents with in-depth data and empower you to respond quickly to minimize damage.
• SMS Authentication: Authenticate identity using a one-time passcode, delivered to any participant in the signing process by SMS. The recipient simply enters that code to confirm their identity, then can access and sign their documents as usual. Details of the process are recorded on the Certificate of Completion as well as in the Envelope History.

Trust and Security: Learn more about the full suite of DocuSign products to keep user information safe.