5 million Heinekens are served each day across 192 countries. With customers all over the world and breweries in more than 70 countries, Heineken needed a consent management solution that could maintain compliance with global regulations like GDPR and CCPA.

But Heineken’s IT team hit a snag when comparing consent management solutions for a customer-facing app. “When we began discovery on our cookie consent project, we found that users would need to opt-in on every use, which we felt would discourage their use of the platform,” said Giacomo Gussoni, IT Commerce & Digital Specialist at Heineken.

To solve this problem, Heineken needed a solution that could balance compliance with customer experience by allowing Heineken to retain consent across devices, domains, and platforms. 

The Problem: Repeated Consent Requests Damage Customer Experience 

In 2022, more than 70 percent of customer experiences span multiple channels, whether via different domains, devices, or platforms. Despite this fact, many outdated consent management and privacy models still dictate that consent is obtained on the user device and stored locally, a model that is not transferrable to other devices or company-owned domains. This creates a no-win situation for both businesses, who suffer poor opt-in rates and loss of customer data, and consumers, who face an unwieldy, often broken customer experience--even when they opt-in. Essentially, each consent form becomes an obstacle to customer engagement.

What's more, this creates a compliance challenge. Under the GDPR, businesses may not repeatedly pester users to opt-in, and must remember and enforce user preferences. A consent management tool that doesn't remember user preferences simply cannot comply. 

For Heineken, this created an untenable situation. “Customer experience is extremely important to us—we want to provide the best possible experience on our platform to make the customer relationship stronger. The repeated opt-in was a major issue for us, and one we needed to solve without spending significant resources developing or deploying a solution,” said Gussoni.

To address this, the Heineken team needed a solution that could retain and apply customer consent across various platforms, domains, and devices, and that could be deployed quickly, with minimal lift from the IT team. “We needed a solution that would be easy to maintain--ideally something provided as-a-service so that there would be a minimal impact on architecture and other systems,” said Gussoni. 

Balancing Compliance and Customer Experience with Ensighten CC

Enter Ensighten Consent Cloud (CC). With Ensighten CC, businesses are able to unify consent across the customer journey, through various, domains, devices, and platforms.  This one-consent, applied-anywhere capability empowers businesses to stay in compliance with evolving privacy regulations while protecting the customer experience that they have worked so hard to create. 

And Ensighten CC can be used to augment existing CMPs with this capability. When integrated with Ensighten CC, a CMP will store permissions locally with a cookie, just as it would without Ensighten, but Ensighten will also store the permissions on a cloud server. When the user logs on with a different device or browser, the CMP will first check for permissions locally, and if none are found, will then check with Ensighten for stored permissions, allowing the user to to continue their journey without hurdles. For Heineken, this was a key differentiator. “The ability to deploy Ensighten CC easily, and the easy integration with our cookie management tool was crucial," said Gussoni. 

And, with help from Ensighten's experienced support team, the transition went smoothly. "The collaboration was very beneficial and the communication throughout helped ensure a smooth implementation," said Gussoni. 

With Ensighten CC in place, Heineken was able to easily apply user consent preferences seamlessly throughout the customer journey without needless interruption, resulting in improved opt-in rates, better customer data, and most importantly, happier users. "I believe that without this solution, we would have suffered higher bounce rates, more abandonment, and fewer conversions from users constantly being asked to opt-in," said Gussoni.

Improving Opt-In with Ensighten's Monitoring Capabilities

Once Ensighten was deployed, the Heineken team began looking for more ways to leverage the platform. Beyond simply using Ensighten for global consent, Gussoni said that Heineken has "been impressed with the monitoring capabilities of Ensighten," which let businesses observe opt-out rates detailed level to build insights to improve both user experience and opt-in rates. For Heineken, these capabilities helped further evaluate the customer journey and optimize cookie consent rates.

If you'd like to learn more about Ensighten Privacy or Ensighten CC, please fill out the form below to request a demo, and our team will get back to you quickly to schedule one.