Reassure your website visitors that their information is safe, to build on that awesome customer experience
Hey, everyone. For those of you that watch my videos and read my blogs on a regular basis, you’ll remember that customer journeys and delivering an awesome customer experience online are things I love to talk about. I think they’re super important in the success of any business’ online strategy. Today I want to talk about how using and securing your online forms on your website are going to continue to deliver that positive customer experience.
Customers are, and always will be concerned and aware about the risks of interacting with a form on your website. People have different ways of ensuring wherever they’re online. they’re going to do their best to be as cautious as possible before they actually provide any of their personal information on a form.
So this is something that is really easy to do, but it’s very often overlooked by people, businesses, organizations and marketers, when they’re putting forms on their websites. It’s always just an afterthought, right?
The Expection of Privacy and Safety
Remember that there is an expectation from the customer that the information that they’re submitting on an online form is going to be submitted safely and their information will be kept secure, away from people that they don’t want seeing that information. They’re hearing about data breaches in the news, and other horror stories with passwords being leaked. You have to pay attention to this. Here’s a couple of things you can do.
Use Encryption and SSL Certificates Correctly
Make sure your website is using some form of encryption. That’s making sure you have an SSL certificate that’s up to date and installed correctly. People are going to look in that top left corner of their browser for that lock symbol to get that comfort, knowing data is securely being transmitted between them and your website.
Secure Your Forms
Make sure the forms that you’re using are secure. Use plugins or software, whatever it may be that’s powering your forms to make sure it’s protected against hackers or malware intercepting the data being transmitted between the user and your website.
Manage Who Has Access to Data and use Multifactor Authentication
Make sure that the people that have access to the form information that’s being submitted are the right people and make sure you’re using some form of multifactor authentication to make sure no one can steal someone else’s password, which could result in somebody outside of your organization or somebody within your organization that shouldn’t be seeing that form data or that personal data, having access to that information. That also includes making sure you silo off access to different people on your website, on the administration side to make sure the right people have access to the right sections on the website.
Use Permissions and Roles Effectively
For example, if you’ve got HR team members looking at your job postings on your website, there’s no reason they need to be seeing or having access to other sensitive areas on your website because it’s just not their responsibility or part of the job description. Use rules and assign roles to the right people so they’re having access to the right areas of your website.
Protect Against Data Loss
You want to pay attention to having a backup strategy. It’s not only about securing your data. It’s also about protecting your data. Mistakes happen. Accidents happen. Servers do go down. Make sure you’ve got an adequate backup and disaster recovery strategy in place so that if something inevitable or avoidable does happen, you have the tools in place to get up on your feet very quickly.
If you’d like to chat more about how you can secure the forms on your website and continue delivering an awesome online experience, please feel free to drop a comment below or get in touch with me. Stay safe and have an awesome day.
