Following the announcement that Google will start personalising search results regardless of whether someone has opted-in to a previously. And adding to the raft of Government legislation aimed at combating terrorism and crime Dr. Kirstie Ball of the Open University Business Schools questions how the uses of consumer data are changing the nature of ‘customer service?’
Largely since 9/11, anti-money laundering and counter terrorism (AML/CT) regulations have required financial institutions such as banks and building societies to monitor what we do with our money, and to notify the authorities of suspicious activity. From 2009, the same became true of our own movements, with the introduction of the e-Borders system.
My concern is that recent government initiatives are drawing on private consumer data in a much more intense way. As the private sector becomes more closely integrated into the general delivery of government services, I’m researching what extent the ‘securitises’ aspects of everyday customer data handling, impacts on customer relationship management and systems, and affects frontline staff - the customer service relationship.
At a practical level, there are time and money implications. The travel industry had to warn MPs there would be travel chaos at the start of the holiday season before Ministers agreed to postpone the start of the e-Border checks roll-out from May to October this year.
Then there are complications about who is responsible. If you’re a legacy carrier such as KLM it may be easy to do this: the information is coming straight from the customer. But if you’re a leisure carrier and you service tour operators or sell seats through the internet you don’t necessarily data to pass on. The system is full of holes.
There may be less sympathy for the banks but when their costs go up it’s usually the customer who ends up paying. One of the major High Street names’ now has 2,000 staff dedicated to meeting the requirements of the anti-money laundering and counter terrorism regulations.
However both sectors are unhappy about having to pick up the tab for surveillance work they’re doing on government’s behalf. In 2006 a survey of the financial services sector by KPMG found overall costs had gone up, largely due to the need to train staff in what to look out for and how to judge and manage risk.
Faced with heavy fines for not complying, the regulations have spawned a rash of companies offering special training for staff, which led to an almost 20-fold increase in the number of reports of suspicious activity being filed, from around 5,000 in 1995 to 94,000 in 2004.
Companies feel this is a burden, costly, and unfair on unconventional customers. Ultimately it is compromising the duty of these organisations to act in the interests of their customers first. We need to investigate this, and explore how it may be altering customer relationship management.
Traditionally CRM has been directed towards defining customer attractiveness and value. But these changing national security arrangements are now affording it wider significance.
This includes the assumption that we are all, potentially, suspects, which cannot help but affect the nature of customer-provider relationships, management and service; how will we be judged and how will relationships with people supposed to serve us be shaped by bias?
The Financial Services Authority, for example, advises its members that they should look out for transactions featuring ‘risky’ combinations of people, products and places.
The FSA says you should be interested if you can see no commercial rationale for buying something. They talk about transaction size and complexity and if a customer requests undue levels of secrecy that is suspicious.
Within the travel industry, requesting certain seats on a plane, booking only a single fare, even requesting a special meal may all register as risk factors and will certainly be recorded in the tracking files the Border Agency intends to keep for 10 years.
It’s the effects of such monitoring and human judgements that may in the end have a much more far-reaching impact on the way we live our lives. And that might – like so much that is happening as a result of our surveillance society – go undetected and reported, but for projects like my current one.
At the level of the everyday, it’s clear we’re all going to feel the effects. In circumstances where 'being in the wrong category' results in the freezing of financial assets, deportation or imprisonment, the accuracy and application of profiles becomes critical.
Errors occur when databases are combined, missing information is 'filled in', data quality is poor, and profiles become inaccurate.
At its most dangerous, those factors ‘concretise’ prejudices, potentially affecting our economic opportunity and even liberty.
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