CISO’s 6 Steps to Securing an Excellent CX [Part 1]

How can you effectively safeguard the information your customers entrust in your company, as well as protect proprietary material and data? Begin your journey to a more secure customer experience by following these six steps.

The “bad guys” don’t sleep.

Raise your hand if you’re guilty of sending secure information using your cellular device. Don’t worry—we all do it, despite the inherent risk involved in transmitting sensitive information across cellular and data-driven networks. However, this could leave not only your organization, but also your customers’ personal information, at risk. Customers want to feel safe interacting with your business. A critical component of an excellent customer experience involves ensuring the safety of your customers’ data.

We hear about major breaches taking place seemingly every day and in reality, new breaches are happening every minute—but what is it all worth? What are you worth to a hacker, and is it worth their effort? The answer to the latter question is an undeniable “Yes.” Monetarily, to an attacker, you (and your data) are worth every second and penny it takes to generate a successful intrusion.

This stat always hooks me: 91% of cyberattacks begin with spear phishing emails.

Do you have omnichannel projects that just aren’t moving along as fast as you think they should? What are the hurdles getting in your way? I’ve yet to find a scenario where it’s the technology that’s slowing things down. Don’t get me wrong, omnichannel isn’t easy. It’s a very different approach to customer contact than traditional call centers or even multichannel contact centers. Omnichannel is all about customizing the journey of the person (or thing) trying to interact with your business. First we need to understand what the customer journey actually looks like. This is often a lot harder than it sounds. Most people in a company know their little piece of the customer journey, but very few can articulate the details of the full, beginning-to-end journey. This often requires a lot of exploration, business-level interviews, multi-disciplinary teams, and documentation.

What’s the difference between a data leak and a data breach? I think this is both a great question and an important distinction to understand in today’s climate, where instances of both are regularly making national headlines.

I often hear from folks that in general, small and medium-sized businesses lack a strategy and proper controls, but the big guys have it covered. Well, it might surprise you to learn that 30% of large enterprises state they still lack an overall information security strategy – and we’re talking huge, $25+ billion companies. Overall, 44% of enterprises report they lack a fundamental strategy. I’ll tell you from experience that most companies overestimate their cyber readiness, which means that the real numbers are likely much, much higher than the reported ones.

This blog is kicking off a series on a topic that many of you likely think about quite often: Why is it so hard to protect your organization’s information? This is a fair question, and one I’ve thought about often. To understand the answer, we’ll need to peel back a few layers and understand the root challenge.

Our national Cybersecurity Practice engages in thousands of customer conversations each year, and a few themes consistently emerge as primary concerns. The information security industry is plagued with confusion, complexity, and challenge, to the point that 30% of enterprises worth over $25 billion report that they do not have an overall information security strategy—and that number is substantially worse for the typical organization. Keep in mind that this simply refers to an information security strategy. It does not factor in the ability to implement that strategy, or whether the strategy is comprehensive or effective. Worse, most organizations overestimate their cyber preparedness, and factors like the global workforce shortage, security start-up sprawl, and cloud confusion are stymieing the effective implementation of information security strategies.