Customer centricity asks for a lot.

An organization-wide commitment, it requires the coordination of product development, sales, and marketing to place the individual target customer squarely at the center of all decisions. This shift necessitates the breaking down of barriers—between the business and the customer, between channels, between internal systems where data lies siloed, and between departments that ought to collaborate for holistic engagement.

Customer centricity, then, demands businesses to develop, instate, and steward a mechanism for eliminating frictions in CX, tailoring customer journeys, and mapping all these interactions to glean strategic insights. It’s about giving the customer exactly what they want, wherever and whenever they prefer.

While a more demanding endeavor—given its requirement for extensive strategic, technological, and operational adjustments—customer centricity shares with personalization one crucial balancing act. And it’s this: how does the business be more “personal” without putting data privacy at risk?

• Establishing a foundation for compliance

Taking proactive steps to address privacy gaps is a must, made all the more necessary by the threats of consumer backlash and violation of regulations in key markets. Quite a few factors are involved. Compliance practices, encryption, processes for gaining audience consent, and more.

Why not, however, start at the infrastructure level of your tech stack?

As marketing clouds gain a firm foothold in multiple sectors, vendors have been assuring businesses of their products’ security readiness by brandishing a litany of protective measures—from permission controls to data obfuscation and more. None of this resolve the issue that their clients have no direct control over the data going in and out of the marketing clouds.

• Keeping what matters on premises

Instead of limiting businesses to a purely cloud-based solution, RESUL offers those facing greater regulatory pressure the option of a hybrid architecture deployment.

In a hybrid deployment, RESUL essentially bisects the solution ecosystem into two environments. First, there’s the RESUL Cloud environment, where core solution modules are hosted. It is here that automated process for targeting, engagement, campaign delivery, analysis, and other features take place. The RESUL Cloud environment also stores data related to audience response, campaign performance, and attribution that has been captured from campaigns.

The client environment constitutes the other half of this hybrid setting. The business’s PII and sensitive data is consolidated and then kept in a Customer Information Hub (CIH). The CIH, a centralized database, is kept on-premises, in a private cloud instance, or in a virtual private cloud, while all the unified data is subject to rigorous encryption and obfuscation to prevent exposure

Campaign-related communications are only triggered from the client environment. Customer data required for campaigns and analytics is only sent to the RESUL Cloud environment in an anonymized format. In fact, data transfers only occur through an advanced, site-to-site VPN connection. To facilitate contextual real-time engagement, RESUL has also implemented an Omnichannel Rules Engine in both environments.

Combining customer-centricity and data security

Gifting businesses a far more fortified marketing solution tech stack, RESUL’s hybrid architecture deployment option also retains much of the exceptional scalability and speed distinguishing its pure cloud counterpart from legacy offerings.