Glassdoor sparked public ire after it covertly added customers’ actual names, jobs, and job titles to their beforehand nameless profiles. Whereas Glassdoor tried to reassure customers that the transfer isn’t a giant deal and that their evaluations will stay nameless, customers are understandably unsettled by the corporate unmasking their identities. Headlines comparable to “In the event you’ve left a nasty assessment on Glassdoor, chances are you’ll wish to delete your account” are driving account deletions, including one consumer who referred to as the change a “betrayal of belief.”
Glassdoor’s response to consumer outrage has additional broken buyer belief. It dismissed customers’ considerations, saying that it makes use of this knowledge to confirm customers’ identities and that anonymity will nonetheless be protected (with no clarification on what meaning). And customers’ solely methodology for eradicating this info from their profiles is to delete their account.
If this Reddit advert is any indicator, opponents scent blood within the water:
Glassdoor’s haphazard choices about tips on how to deal with buyer knowledge battle with a core proponent of the platform’s worth proposition: anonymity. However all firms ought to take word: Capturing and utilizing prospects’ knowledge haphazardly is a recipe for catastrophe. Just as a result of you’ve got prospects’ knowledge doesn’t imply you need to use it. And if you utilize prospects’ info in methods they don’t count on, they’ll get upset!
We’ve seen this time and time once more, comparable to DoorDash sharing buyer knowledge unexpectedly with a advertising and marketing co-op and telehealth startups sending sufferers’ psychological well being assessments to Fb, Google, and different promoting companions. In Glassdoor’s case, one consumer says she contacted customer support with an e-mail handle that had her identify related to it. She later discovered that her identify was added to her profile with out her consent. In different instances, customers do not know the place Glassdoor sourced the info, and it isn’t all the time correct.
Ensure you have a knowledge technique that examines not solely how a buyer’s knowledge will profit your organization but in addition the way you’ll use it to ship worth again to the shopper. In any other case, you threat a public backlash, lack of buyer belief, and regulatory investigations and fines.