Gigya Moves to Centralize Management of Digital Customer Interactions

Gigya, fresh from revealing that it will be acquired by SAP, announced this week a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that makes it simpler to centrally manage customer preferences associated with terms of service, marketing campaigns, and the right to be forgotten.

Company CEO Patrick Salyer says Gigya Enterprise Preference Manager provides a cloud service that enables IT organizations to streamline digital interactions with customers at a time when new compliance regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are about to be enforced by the European Union.

Salyer notes that managing those interactions has become especially complex because so many online services today consist of multiple components and modules being delivered by company partners. An end customer may opt out of one service, but if all the companies delivering some subset of that service via an application programming interface (API) are not informed, some subset of the digital service could easily wind up being continued to be delivered, says Salyer. The cost of continuing to deliver that service once rules such as GDPR go into effect could be substantial. Similar rules are being considered in Australia, Canada and China. Because of that issue, Salyer says, organizations need a lot more visibility into how digital services are interconnected.

“There’s going to be a need for a lot more transparency,” says Salyer.

Most IT organizations, notes Salyer, don’t have the capability to manage and track those interactions on their own. Because of that issue, Salyer contends that it makes a lot more sense for organizations to centrally manage digital interactions with customers via a SaaS application to improve the quality of those interactions, while at the same time protecting themselves from costly fines associated with violating, for example, a GDPR provision. Those two issues are at the heart of the reason SAP is acquiring Gigya, adds Salyer.

Most organizations manage their digital interactions with customers in ways that at best can be described as inconsistent. That lack of a consistent approach often winds up doing more to frustrate and annoy the end customer than it does to bind them closer to that organization. The issue now, however, is that many of those end customers will soon be taking out those frustrations by reporting those interactions to authorities that now have the power to make organizations pay for not responsibly managing their customer relationships.