Your Customers' Top Digital Engagement Strategies and What They Mean for Security

Your customers must enhance their abilities to engage with consumers and create positive user experiences online. Additionally, they need to be able to utilize technology to improve internal business processes. Consumers are no longer limited by proximity or selection at a local store, as they can purchase any product from anywhere via ecommerce channels. Therefore, to compete in these arenas, SMBs need a strong online presence that allows them to engage consumers in a positive way.

Today’s organizations aim to create personalized, well-timed messaging, a strong customer service presence, and loyalty programs that cut through the noise to increase brand awareness and earn long-term loyal customers. To do this, there are several strategies and tools they rely on to drive engagements.

However, they need to be careful to consider how deploying these tools within their networks can impact security infrastructure, especially when dealing with sensitive customer data.

 Your Customers’ Strategies to Drive Digital Engagements

To offer enhanced experiences and drive digital engagements, your customers have turned to myriad tools and strategies. Leveraging these tactics, many of which are cloud-based, enables smaller organizations to scale to meet modern demands without heavy upfront investments in infrastructure.

 Some of the most popular tactics include:

 What Digital Engagements Mean for Cybersecurity

While all of these tactics are centered on creating a positive customer experience, there is one thing that can make it all go south: a data breach. Think about this: 69 percent of consumers say businesses are responsible for protecting this data, and 64 percent are unlikely to do business with an organization that loses their personal information. Beyond consumer retention, there are also compliance issues to contend with when storing personally identifiable data.

These digital engagement strategies are wrought with cyber risks that could be extremely detrimental to business success for many reasons:

 How Partners Can Assist Through Services Offerings 

Digitally engaging with consumers is essential in today’s consumer environment, but your customers must do so in a way that does not compromise consumer trust. That said, digital engagement tactics and cybersecurity strategy must go hand in hand.

Partners can help to mitigate security challenges, enabling SMBs to increase digital engagements by shifting to a service-oriented business model. Fortinet offers customizable services that reduce the strain on SMB resources and personnel, with an expert understanding of threat trends, how to reduce network complexity and how to effectively secure multi-cloud environments.

Our Security Services are presided over by FortiGuard Labs, our dedicated in-house threat-research team. Through these services, organizations get enterprise-grade security regardless of their size.

Security services reduce the strain placed on your customers with up-to-the-minute threat intelligence to stop attacks in real time and provide insight into any new avenues that can be used to exploit your network. Furthermore, our global network of sensors means that your customers are getting insight into the tactics being used by cybercriminals around the world, in addition to activity detected in their local network. This combination of global and local intelligence is essential for proactive cybersecurity.

SMBs can customize their service packages to cater to their specific network. For example, businesses that build mobile apps to connect to consumers through loyalty programs would likely want to subscribe to the Web Application Security Service. If, in addition to building their own apps, your customers are using multiple SaaS applications from various vendors, our Cloud Sandboxing Services can be deployed alongside the application services. To ensure comprehensive protection, many SMB organizations begin with the UTM Bundle, which include advanced antivirus, antispam, application control, web filtering, sandboxing and intrusion prevention. The UTM Bundle can then be augmented with additional customer services.

Leveraging security services allows your customers to get the best of both worlds: enhanced digital engagement with customers, with a focus on security to maintain trust in the long term.

Final Thoughts

Your customers have taken to adopting new tools and strategies to engage with their consumers online and stay competitive. This is essential to success, as today’s consumers expect seamless and personalized service. However, this can be at odds with their other expectation: secure personal data. As your SMB customers deploy digital engagement tools, they need to ensure they have the security infrastructure in place–be it tools, processes or manpower–to maintain data protection as their network becomes more distributed.

This can be resource intensive, causing SMBs to try to pick between the two. With advanced security services, like those from FortiGuard Labs, your customers can increase their digital presence with security from an expert team that ensures reduced network complexity, real-time threat intelligence and proactive security.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.