In the first of what will be an annual snapshot of Chief
Privacy Officers (CPOs), we look at the role privacy
professionals play within their organizations.

Though E-Loan operates in a sector where full transparency in regard to privacy issues is rare, the company goes beyond regulations in the name of customers.

If your organization suddenly had to compete with 15 new companies in your space, what would you do?
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If you are Eneco Energie, a Holland-based supplier of gas, electricity, and heat, you’d merge your customer data with operations data. In 2002, faced with the liberalization of the energy market, the company centralized these two data sources in an effort to stay ahead of the competition. “What we saw is that we needed an early warning system, or we would lose a lot of customers,” says Ton van den Dungen, manager of business intelligence and control at Eneco.

Early in 2004 Boston-based advertising agency Partners + Simons won the BlueCross BlueShield of Massachusetts (BCBSMA) account. It was a big win for the agency and a potentially huge account with a substantial ad budget. So, according to CEO Tom Simons, the agency set out to find out what the healthcare provider’s customers needed and valued from the company, as well as what they expected from its advertising messaging.

Outsourcing in Eastern Europe may give global organizations a cost advantage, but it offers several customer-focused benefits as well. Amit Shankardass, senior vice president of solution planning at ClientLogic, cites three key areas in which customers see returns.
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Knowledge bases have long been used to help contact center agents access information more quickly, create a corporate “memory,” and share solutions to customer problems. Today these same knowledge bases are being used to help make contact centers more efficient in another way: through online self-service. “Knowledge management was always about becoming more efficient as an organization — the main selling points may have morphed a little bit, but nothing has really changed,” says Jason Holmberg, a product manager at FrontRange Solutions.
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The buzz about offshoring activities in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and even Poland begs a question: Do they sprechen sie call center outsourcing in Eastern Europe?
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As senior vice president of sales and marketing for Pulmonetic Systems, a medical device manufacturer, Geri Robinson’s responsibility is to “take the perspective of the customer to the organization,” she said during her keynote at the recent Frost & Sullivan Sales & Marketing Summit.

<b>Be customer-centric.</b> Unless the company as a whole is organizing business around the customer lifecycle rather than around individual product goals, combining the contact center and marketing operations will ultimately be fruitless.

Bell Canada is making a splash. From advertising dominance at Toronto’s busy intersections, to sponsorship of the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, most places Canadians turn they see the Bell Canada brand. The communications provider hopes the flurry of advertisements and the aggressive 125th anniversary marketing campaign will shed the image some analysts have formed that the company is asleep at the switch.