Customer Trust Matters: How Cybersecurity Impacts SaaS Users
Imagine this: you wake up one day only to find out that your SaaS business has been a victim of a cyber attack and a chunk of the sensitive data you’ve been gathering has been compromised. This is devastating for any business, regardless of the size.
The average cost of a data breach was $4.45 million in 2023, a 15% increase over 3 years. Even if you can recover from the financial losses and penalties that result from this, chances are you can never get back the most important factor for your SaaS brand’s success and survival - customer trust.
Customers are unlikely to trust your company if it falls victim to a data breach. Businesses that endure major data breaches lose at least half their customers.
Unfortunately, no one is immune to cyber-attacks these days. Those in the SaaS industries are even more at risk, considering that their services are digital. A security breach these days is one of the fastest way to ruin customer trust, and the repercussions are devastating - lost relationships, damaged reputation, decrease in revenue, and more.
All of this points to the dire need to take action and create a more resilient, stronger security infrastructure. With that in mind, this post will teach you how cybersecurity can positively impact SaaS users and give you some tips on how to implement it.
Cybersecurity and customer trust: what is the connection
Cybersecurity is the key to building customer trust. Online threats are constantly on the rise and customers are more aware of the risks than ever. Today’s consumers will want to know how you process and use their data, and they will seek assurance that you will protect their information. Robust security measures don’t only safeguard your business against those hefty data privacy penalties from regulatory bodies but also help you build customer relationships by establishing a foundation of trust.
Generally speaking, cybersecurity is linked in three major ways to customer trust:
Protecting sensitive information
Protecting the business’ reputation
Keeping the business compliant with data laws and regulations
Implementing a security system that boosts customer trust
Now that we have established why cybersecurity matters for customer trust, it’s time to get to action. Below you’ll find a comprehensive guide on how to implement a security system that will help you increase the customers’ trust in your SaaS business.
Detecting risks and vulnerabilities
The very first step in crafting a successful cybersecurity plan is understanding and detecting the risks and vulnerabilities. Considering that these days criminals use automation and other advanced technology to breach data, doing this manually can prove to be extremely costly and difficult - not to mention, pretty risky. Unless you have a team of hundreds of people ready to scour customers’ data and compare their behaviors and patterns, you should consider leveraging software to address the challenges.
Fraud and anti-money laundering detection
Online fraud is expected to more than double in the next few years. To protect your SaaS business, you need an end-to-end, scalable solution that will help you detect, prevent, and deal with modern fraud attacks. An anti-money laundering or AML software is designed to help SaaS businesses meet regulatory requirements and combat financial crime. This type of software checks customers against watchlists and crime lists and does thorough screening and monitoring to complement your KYC and KYB checks.
Every single day, there are over 2,200 attacks, which equals one cyber attack every 39 seconds! Thanks to automation and modern software, businesses are now able to keep track of all activity on their website in real-time, compare it to patterns used by cyber criminals, and therefore find and prevent any fraud attempts before they harm the company or its customers.
Continuous auditing and monitoring are key to maintaining a good security program.
Advanced authentication protocols
There is a reason why businesses make dual-factor authentication mandatory these days - it is an effective way to prevent cybercrime and maintain the customer’s trust. Yes, your customers will need to go through additional steps to access their data or make their purchases, but this will lead to more security.
The customers are well aware of this today - and even expect it. From a customer standpoint, measures such as authentication protocols (one-time passwords and codes, multifactor authentication, and biometrics) reassure them that their data will be handled with care. A business that values data privacy will undoubtedly add an extra layer of security, making sure that hackers cannot access their customers’ accounts even if their passwords have been compromised.
Better access control
If you give access to more people just for the sake of it, you are increasing the risk of data breaches. Why?
The factors that contribute to data breaches aren’t always external.
Take, for instance, the case of Pegasus Airlines from 2022. In March 2022, a cybersecurity team notified the company that a large amount of their sensitive data was left unprotected, at the reach of any hacker online. The exposed data contained sensitive flight data that pilots used to manage in-flight processes and included everything from software source code to flight charts to crew PII.
Had a breach occurred, this would have affected not only the flight crew but also thousands of passengers. This is a breach of the personal data protection law in Turkey, which comes with a minimum fine of $183,000, which in this case could have reached millions.
The reason for this incident was human error and employee negligence.
While you will probably need to give access to different people working for your SaaS business, you should limit this access to authorized personnel and only those who actually need to access and use that data. This will significantly reduce the risk of internal breaches.
Employee training
More often than not, internal security breaches occur without the employee’s intention. When people within your SaaS business are uninformed about methods for handling data and don’t have specific rules and guidelines in place, they won’t know how to avoid vulnerabilities and data breaches.
That being said, if you want your customers to trust your business, you must start with your employees. Educating your staff about safe practices will reduce the risks of internal breaches.
When training your staff, you might want to create and implement an incident response plan as well. Sometimes, no matter what software you use or how careful you are, data breaches can still happen, and your team should know which steps to take in such a scenario. This will allow for a quicker reaction time and reduce the potential damage.
Data encryption
The impact of cybersecurity on customer trust is enormous. Remember - these people are sharing their personal information with you, most likely even their financial data seeing how SaaS services are mostly paid online. If you want them to trust your business and keep using it, you need to make sure that the data is not easily accessible to cyber criminals.
The obvious solution? Encryption, of course. Encrypting data means that, even if a breach occurs, the information will remain unreadable to the criminal. Encryption scrambles the data into code and prevents unauthorized access.
Secure data handling
Encrypting the information is far from enough. The next step to take is to implement measures to ensure that data is handled and stored safely. We are talking about enforcing access controls, using secure storage devices, and performing regular updates and patches.
Regular security audits
Finally, you should implement ongoing security assessments to identify and fix vulnerabilities before hackers can exploit them. Doing this often will allow you to find any new vulnerabilities or discover new methods cybercriminals use to access sensitive data.
How does this help you build customer trust?
Let’s say that you have an excellent cybersecurity system that includes all of the steps above. How can this boost customer trust?
Well, for starters, having such a system will ensure that your business doesn’t fall victim to a cyber attack. This will keep you from paying the high fees of privacy data regulations and keep your good reputation intact.
However, to really use this to your advantage and boost customer trust, you should tell your customers about it!
Be upfront about your security measures to build trust with customers. Regularly update them about your security protocols and explain to them why you are using them. Use simple language, and tutorials, send them messages, and include it all in your privacy policy. Your customer should know exactly how their data is being used and processed.
In case an incident occurs, it’s important to be transparent about it. This is the only way to restore customer confidence. Provide regular updates, telling customers about the resolution of the incident and what you are doing to fix it.