The Logic Group Blog Customer data: handle with care!

Your customer data (email addresses, transaction history and such like) is a bit like having a pet cobra: treat it well and you have a really cool pet that makes for great smoasting. But if you don't look after it you're likely to become a funny/tragic news story in a Wednesday edition of a popular tabloid. Well, not exactly but both can come back to bite you and cost you an arm and a leg. The succinctly named General Data Protection Regulation (shortened helpfully to another acronym - GDPR) will be the most comprehensive shake up of data protection laws in 20 years brought about by the explosion of social media and online purchasing. If you collect and store any data on your customers when they buy from you then this will affect you.What counts as data? Pretty much everything! Any personal information falls under the regulation and must be protected as securely as you would treat credit card numbers. Even capturing the delivery address so that you can send their goods counts if you're an online retailer, as an example.GDPR comes into force in 2018. Seems like a way away but if retailers are not compliant by the live date the fines are up to 4% of a company's global revenue. If that isn't motivating enough then the potential damage to your reputation is a bigger stick with which to beat you.Luckily we have in-house experts who know all about what you need to do for GDPR. You can read more here and here. Act now and don't allow your customer data to become a slippery, biting snake in the grass.