How to Increase Customer Confidence with the Right Privacy Policy

The following article was submitted by Heather Wills from TRUSTe, who reminds us that customer confidence can lead to more sales…and gaining customer confidence starts with ensuring their privacy.

Privacy – It’s Your Best Policy

As a small business, you may dismiss the idea of having a privacy policy. However, with identity theft on the rise, affecting almost 10 million victims in 2008 (Javelin Strategy & Research: www.javelinstrategy.com), privacy has become highly relevant to both consumers and businesses.

A privacy policy is a legal document that discloses how a party retains, processes, discloses, and purges a customer’s data. Such examples could be the instance of a website providing information about the use of personal information – particularly personal information collected via the website – by the website owner. (Source: Wikipedia)

Gain Confidence to Gain Customers

According to a Yankee Research study, 55 percent of consumers surveyed said they had experienced online incidents, which caused them to consider a possible security issue when visiting a Website.

With more people online now than ever before, the number of cyber-criminals trying to exploit consumer information has also grown to record numbers. This makes third party trustmarks an essential tool for both consumers and businesses, irrespective of their size.

Ensure that your Privacy Policy addresses the following issues:

• The information that will be collected: email addresses, date of birth, etc
•  What will be done with information collected?
• Whether a third party will use this information?
• Measures undertaken by the company in order to protect the information
• How the privacy policy is in compliance with the law
• Contact information

A privacy policy needs to be simple and friendly. It should disclose all points pertaining to the information collected from customers and how it is going to be used.

About TRUSTe

TRUSTe provides companies with simple, iconic, and easy-to-read privacy statements that reflect and protect the businesses they serve. You can opt for professional help from TRUSTe, which provides industry-leading complaint-handling services for small and medium businesses. These services can help you simplify privacy issues and protect your reputation. This also means that you will not have to approach a lawyer for a simple privacy policy.

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