Gathering customer information is an integral part of any business strategy as it allows businesses to employ market segmentation and thus devise the most the appropriate marketing strategy for their current and future products. However, sometimes this could lead to unintentional stress among customers. Imagine your phone company tracking down not only your phone usage, location and payment patterns but also your internet usage as well. Seems sketchy, eh? This is the new strategy for Bell, who said it would collect customer information with the intention of selling it for ads.

An advantage of this is that Bell would be able to generate more profit as their ads would now be directly catered towards their customer’s needs. Likewise, they are able to create a new revenue stream as it would allow them to sell customer data to its key partners for ads.

However, Bell’s move may decrease customer loyalty as some consumers may feel uncomfortable with sharing their personal information with the company. Likewise, it may also result in stakeholder conflict from pressure groups. Organizations such as the Privacy Commissioner of Canada have already began looking into Bell’s recent strategy to see if it complies with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). If organizations such as this find Bell’s behavior problematic, then the conflict that arises would result in litigation costs for Bell and ultimately tarnish their reputation.

In order for Bell to maintain strong customer relationships, it needs to find the best way to collect information from its customers in a way that would not make its customers feel insecure. How could they do this? Possibly by first asking the customers through questionnaires and anonymous surveys in order to understand what they really want first or by making their new consumer behavior tracking system optional for its customers.

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