A CRM System can help with privacy management.

• Position: Marketing News - Privacy management products - Brief Article

Got your privacy management problems under control yet? Do your customers know what your policies are? Have they begun to rebel at the number of disclosure notices they've received? Are they reading your disclosure notices or throwing them in the trash?

If privacy management is still a concern, Ginger Gagen has a suggestion: CRM.

As the deadline approached last July for distributing privacy-disclosure notices, consumers and consumer organizations grew increasingly critical of the methods most banks used to disseminate policy information, Gagen says. In the process of informing customers about the "opt-out" nature of these policies, she says, "something went wrong."

"It should have been straightforward and easy for consumers to exercise their rights under the law," she says. "However, a recent survey conducted by the American Bankers Association shows that only 36 percent of respondents said they had read their banks' privacy notices. Another 22 percent said they received the notice but did not read it, and 41 percent could not remember receiving it at all. More astonishing-only 5 percent of the people receiving the notices have opted out by returning the forms."

Gagen, a CRM specialist with Sedona Corp., King of Prussia, Pa., says banks could improve customers' comprehension (and response) by making use of a CRM system. Better yet, with a CRM system, banks could...