Customer Trust Programs for Security & Privacy Teams

Trust is at the core of doing business. Empower your organization to build it with your customers with a strong security and privacy customer trust program. 

What is a Customer Trust Program?

A Customer Trust Program extends far beyond those “lovely” security and privacy questionnaires our security teams get so excited about filling out. This is particularly exciting at the end of the quarter or fiscal year when the sales teams descend on security teams. For sales teams, questionnaires are inhibitors — for security teams, they’re an added burden.

Customer Trust Programs help to reduce and even eliminate friction between these teams and your customers. They provide a transparent mechanism to assure an organization’s security and privacy practices. 

Why use a Customer Trust Program?

If we’re looking for the “why” these programs generate value, we need to ask ourselves this question: “Would you do business with an organization that you didn’t trust with your data?” 

The simplest (and most correct) answer is an emphatic “No.” 

If you’re a security, privacy, or compliance team looking to enable the business instead of being viewed as a cost center, trust programs are a way to demonstrate the value your team can bring to the table. The program directly contributes to the organization’s marketing and sales efforts, instilling and sustaining customer trust. This trust is crucial in differentiating your product or service from your competitors to generate revenue.

So how do we build this program?

Building an effective trust program takes a multi-faceted approach. As with most new initiatives in security, there are two factors that play into its success: the technology and the people. 

Customer Trust Programs: Technology

Let’s start with where you can look to expand your capabilities when building a trust program.

Compliance

Review your compliance program to determine the current state of your compliance posture. Strong compliance postures come from a robust security and privacy program — documentation, attestations, and certifications set the foundation to build your trust program. Then, you can showcase your commitments to customers and demonstrate how they are met. 

Knowledge Base

If you don’t have one already, design and build a knowledge base to rapidly complete your questionnaires  (assuming your customer isn’t satisfied with your existing program and needs to complete the questionnaire anyway). Knowledge bases reduce redundant tasks, helping streamline and semi-automate your responses.

Trust Portal

Design and build a customer trust portal to showcase your security and privacy programs. If you’re considering buying vs building, there are plenty of great solutions. Customer Trust portals enable security, sales, products, and any other team to share security and privacy information with external stakeholders easily, with an eNDA in place, all executed within the portal itself. It also can track interactions, plus provide analytics and insights into key behaviors inside the portal. If you’re curious about what a world-class customer trust portal solution looks like, check out Atlas One’s partner, SafeBase, for reference.

Customer Trust Programs: Collaboration

Your trust program can have the best tech stack in place, but it's ineffective without a plan for implementing trust program change. Let’s look at the different functions, departments, and stakeholders involved with building a customer trust program.

Legal

Some Legal teams don’t have the expertise to effectively redline and negotiate security addendums and data protection agreements (DPA). In some companies, they may consult with select members of the security team, typically CISOs, to advise on whether certain clauses are acceptable for contractual commitment. 

Legal teams may experience high turn rates with their customer counterparts, leading to delays in the sales cycles — this in turn causes friction with sales teams. To reduce turn rates, ensure company alignment with commitments, and empower Legal teams, a Legal playbook build-out is recommended. This will outline the standard security and privacy provisions, while also setting “wiggle room” thresholds within the organization’s tolerance. While the build-out takes front-loading, it will save massive back-end headaches for all your teams. 

Account Executives and Account Managers

Get ahead of the game by providing AEs and AMs with role-based training to speak to the basics of product security and privacy as features and benefits. This shouldn’t be intended to have them become subject matter experts —rather, it should be intended to empower them to speak to those capabilities confidently. Your customers will appreciate when this is addressed up front (and even be impressed that security and privacy are front of mind for the product they might be purchasing. 

In-Depth Evaluators

Do you have a SOC 2 Type II report? Great!

When was the last time your team evaluated the effectiveness and quality of how its control narratives are written? Do you find yourself sending it to customers, only for them to come back with a myriad of the same repeat questions? Especially when they could be addressed by simply designing and implementing controls, or even speaking to existing controls that could be captured in Section 4 of the report? 

Some may say that no one reads these reports — they do a quick glance to check off the boxes (i.e. Is it current?; Are there any exceptions noted?; etc.). But there are plenty of folks that actually evaluate the report. Don’t forget about them in your customer trust program. 

GTM Team

Support the go-to-market team by providing insight into timelines for security and privacy assessments. This helps forecasting efforts and determining timelines for when opportunities should materialize within a given quarter or fiscal year. 

For example, if your organization is pursuing a new target segment from a more regulated industry in the coming quarters (financial services, banking, etc.) the timelines for undergoing security and privacy reviews are noticeably longer and more extensive than most other industries. If your finance and sales teams expect to close an opportunity within a given quarter, it may make sense to budget more time for the security and privacy reviews, which sets more realistic expectations among key stakeholders.

This collaborative approach helps strengthen cross-functional working dynamics to achieve quarterly objectives, leveraging a customer trust strategy as a competitive advantage in that particular market segment. 

The Vision of Customer Trust Programs

As you have seen, Customer Trust Programs take a multifaceted approach and involve strong collaboration among cross-functional partners. Developing a new program using these facets can enable your business, enhance customer trust, and propel your ability to sustain trust in the marketplace as your business scales.