In this episode of Mistaken Identity, Matt interviews Marla Hay, Vice President of Security, Privacy and Data Management at Salesforce. Marla’s been at Salesforce for six years. Today, she works to make it easy for consumers to keep their customer data secure and private.

When it comes to customer privacy, authentication tools are important to get right. Marla describes how to treat customer data carefully, and why that’s important to building great relationships. She also dives into her experience with user testing to build great products and improve existing ones.

Key Quotes:

“Consumer privacy is so important and fundamental to the future of where we're going with technology, innovation, and being able to provide an experience that is useful to consumers. It requires that they have inherent trust in their ability to give data to you as a company.”

“It’s a very exciting time for authentication and it's a good reason to also make sure we're offloading things like those authentication capabilities to companies that do that. So I think it's exciting to see that.”

“There's nothing like actually sitting with a customer and watching them use your stuff.”

“Using data in a consented way and treating it very carefully means you're gonna have a really, really great relationship with your consumers. They are gonna continue to invest in you via their business and their data when you're treating the data the way they've asked you to treat it.”

“We're super excited to be at the forefront of privacy protection around generative AI. I think it's really the combination of those things like user experience and privacy. User experience and security feel like they're a little at odds, but they're actually not, they actually go really well together.”

Time stamps:

00:30 What’s your identity?

1:28 Why consumer privacy is important

5:08 How to retain customers

07:42 Leveraging customer identity

10:02 How to improve the customer experience

12:22 Build vs. buy

17:03 Why testing is important

24:51 Pursuing innovation at Salesforce

27:58 Can any company disrupt?

29:28 Future-thinking

40:37 Quick hits

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Links:

Follow Marla on LinkedIn
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More about Okta

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