Five questions to consider when building consent into customer journeys

It often starts with an email from the legal team. “We need customers to agree to ____ when they login.” Then, when you start whiteboarding these new customer consents into your sign-in flow, the conversation quickly turns to the customer experience. 

Specifically: How do you make sure all those new consent clicks don’t create clumsy journeys and degraded customer experiences that drag down your conversion rates?

To help keep your customers happy, here are five key questions to ask (and a few recommendations) that can help consent management coexist with a great customer experience.

1. Does everyone need to consent?

Too often, apps take a one-size-fits-all approach. But the reality is that many consents only apply to some customers. 

Under (or over) a certain age? Accessing the app from a certain state or country? Haven’t yet provided any sensitive info? If so, maybe you don’t need to check the box. 

A good consent management solution can segment which consents get served up to different users based on where they are or profile info you already have.

2. When should they receive the consent?

It’s tempting to just get it all over with and stack up those consents within the account sign-up box. I mean, it works for doctor’s offices, right? But if you do that, your conversion rates may suffer. 

It’s best to capture consents when it’s most relevant. For example, you may not capture any personal information when a user signs up. But then, when they want to buy something, you’re asking for more info. That’s a better moment in the journey to get consent. 

Here’s another example. Let’s say it’s December, you just updated your terms and conditions, and you want customers to agree to them by January 1. You could make the terms and conditions an optional consent in December. Then, come January any customers who haven’t agreed yet will get prompted as a mandatory consent. 

To learn more about the ins and outs of different types of consents check out our last post: The beginner’s guide to consent management for customers.

3. How many boxes are too many boxes?

Generally speaking when you ask for more than two or three consents at a time, the experience starts to deteriorate. 

As you think about the previous question, look for ways to push less time-sensitive consents off to a future sign-in or a different moment in the customer journey.That will help keep customer clicks within that magic number and reduce the risk of drop-off. 

4. How can customers see what they’ve consented to?

This one often gets overlooked when brands build a consent management capability in house. Like anything else done after the fact, engineering a “preference center” or “subscription manager” into the customer profile downstream can lead to inelegant solutions. 

Give careful, advance consideration to the customer’s expectations for transparency, and you’ll have much happier customers. 

5. How easy is it for customers to un-consent?

This is another common pitfall for folks that aren’t using a commercial CIAM or consent management solution. It’s also an important one because it’s a GDPR requirement. 

So while you consider how and where customers can review (and understand) what they’ve agreed to, consider also how you can enable an intuitive and self-service approach for customers to update their consents over time.

At Strivacity, we are all about creating remarkably simple sign-in experiences for customers. We love keeping things simple for legal teams, too. That’s why we’ve baked consent management into our CIAM offering as core capability – making it easy to weave consents into your customers’ sign-in journeys.

If you’re looking to improve your consent management process, we’d be happy to offer a complimentary review of your approach. Just let us know. 

Or take a closer look at our capabilities. We’d love to show you what Strivacity can do.