Risk Management Automation and Customer Engagement: Rupees in the Grass

Risk management automation and customer engagement don’t automatically appear interrelated. In The Legend of Zelda, rupees (the game’s form of currency) could be obtained in exciting ways, such as defeating enemies. However, they could be obtained more easily by doing mundane tasks like cutting grass or bushes. Risk management automation is the rupee of customer engagement because it is the hidden treasure in the mundane activity.

If you’re curious about going on a quest for better customer engagement by using ZenGRC, schedule a demo or call one of our GRC heroes.

Why Word of Mouth Matters

Your customers have more value than just the money they spend on your product. Customer lifetime value (CLV) accounts for both the customer’s spending on your product and the intangibles associated with that customer’s business.

One of these intangibles is word of mouth, and it’s basically free marketing. If you’re a company that people like, they’re going to talk about you. If they’re sharing their positive experiences, they’re selling your business without you having to pay someone to come up with a slogan.

This is why it’s important to include word of mouth as part of your CLV calculations. However, that’s not as easy as it sounds. For the most part, individual customers have fluctuating values.

Some customers really upsell you and convince an otherwise uninterested individual to invest in what you’re selling. This direct value aligns with your business strategies—without that customer, the listener wouldn’t have thought to buy your product. That listener is a direct profit increase.

Some customers simply talk about your product or service even though the listener was going to buy it anyway. This acts as a cost savings. You never had to spend money to reach the listener. That cost savings to your marketing is an indirect value associated with the original customer.  

While both of these need to be incorporated in your CLV, the latter is your rupee in the tall grass, hiding but valuable.

How Reputation Relates to Word of Mouth

If people are talking positively about your business, your business is going to succeed. Just like little kids on a playground, customers chatter. According to a 2015 Moz survey, 67.7% of survey respondents said that online reviews impacted their purchasing decisions.

Social value, the personal or social network interactions with a business, and emotional value, the feelings that product elicits, are two of the main drivers for customer engagement. Internet reviews, therefore, are the foundation of your reputation because they incorporate both social value and emotion. A positive review means that social value is related to positive emotions. Negative reviews offer the opposite.

Why InfoSec Compliance is the Silent Partner

While most people don’t understand the technicalities of information security, they do understand words like “Equifax” and “WannaCry.” News organizations cover breaches more often as they become more costly and more dangerous to consumers.

People fear what they don’t understand. When people don’t understand how to protect their information, they rely on their business partners to protect them. This means your customers are relying on you to defeat the enemy so you can earn your rupees.

What Happens wWhen a Breach Occurs?

While positive reviews lead to more purchases, negative reviews lead to loss of income. On average, a customer with a bad experience shares this experience with eight to sixteen people. Those people then share with their friends. This means that a single breached customer can lead to a loss of forty to eighty customers.

Loss of reputation impacts your business just as much as your positive customer engagement outreach practices do.

How Enterprise Risk Management Automation and Customer Engagement Are Your Rupees in the Tall Grass

Enterprise risk management automation helps you keep your house in order. When you’re meeting security compliance requirements, your customers know they can trust you. If you’re SOC compliant, your customers know that you’ve analyzed your risks and established controls to protect their information.

When they trust you, they’re loyal to you.  This means that your customers are going to talk about you, and they’re going to do it in a positive manner. Each one of those customers is adding value to your business.

How Enterprise Risk Management Automation Helps

Over the next few years, the industry is going to see a rise in compliance standards. Not only will the GDPR be implemented in 2018, but more regulatory requirements are possible consequences  of the Equifax breach.

This means that you need to know not only where you’re already compliant but also what you need to do to get fully compliant quickly. ZenGRC provides gap analysis of your current compliance controls, their overlap with new regulations/standards, and the remaining gaps in compliance.

Managing your security reviews and software updates as part of your compliance program helps keep you safe from a breach. Compliance is not security. However, compliance ensures that you’re following best practices that help keep your systems safe.

How to Value an Automated Compliance Tool’s ROI

For many in the c-suite, an automated tool is one more expense. If your current spreadsheets are effectively managing your compliance, then you might find it hard to justify the cost of an automated tool. It may seem difficult to reconcile the seemingly intangible benefit of “time savings” with your organization’s bottom line.

However, automated compliance tools come with a hidden value, just like cutting the tall grass in The Legend of Zelda can bring you rupees. This hidden value is integral to your customer engagement strategy.

When you have a tool that makes information security compliance more efficient, your CISO and your IT department spend less time on administrative tasks and more time on protecting you. When they spend more time protecting you, they keep your systems safer. When your systems are safer, you’re less likely to have a data breach. If you’re less likely to have a data breach, your customers can trust you and spread a positive message about your business.

In other words, you’re getting not just cost savings, but also positive word of mouth, from your automated tool. As your information security stance becomes more important to customer engagement, you need to focus your resources on the areas that matter. This means cutting down on administrative duties like tracking tasks and gathering documentation.

If your quest is to add revenue by bringing in more customers, use a tool that helps you cut down that tall grass to find the rupees.