Francesca’s delivers unique, free-spirited fashion & lifestyle products, creating a space to amplify the voices of everyone seeking self-expression. They are known for offering carefully curated fashion, accessories, jewelry & lifestyle products that celebrate individuality. 

Challenge: implementing a consent banner ASAP to meet U.S. state privacy enforcement deadlines

With 20 million annual site visitors, Francesca’s boutiques counts their website as a critical channel in meeting revenue and growth targets. And in the modern digital and regulatory landscape, respecting the privacy rights of those visitors is part of doing business.

As U.S. state privacy legislative activity increased, Chief Technology Officer Mike Early knew Francesca’s would need a technology solution to become compliant with the growing number of passed state laws. With boutiques in 45 U.S. states, Francesca’s would be required to comply with just about every U.S. state privacy law, existing now and in the future. 

Must-have requirements included:

• Fast banner deployment: they wanted the banners to be up and running as quickly as possible to meet the biggest enforcement deadline looming: CPRA compliance on January 1, 2023
• Legal policy templates: Francesca’s has minimal in-house legal resources, and needed a tech solution that included templates for each data privacy law or regulation 
• DSR workflow: A tool to facilitate intake of data subject requests (DSRs) was important, to ensure timely response to customers submitting data access or delete requests 

Mike was familiar with Ketch from his previous company, and knew it could be a great fit for Francesca’s needs.

“The privacy of our customers' data is very important to us, and we want to make sure we are acting in accordance with their wishes as well as complying with all state laws. Ketch helps us do this without a lot of overhead so we can focus our internal resources on growing our technology capabilities and supporting our aggressive omni-channel growth plans.”

Mike Early, Chief Technology Officer, Francesca's

Solution: collaborative, hands-on deployment to get up and running fast 

Francesca’s selected Ketch with a promise of easy, hands-off deployment. Ketch Customer Success Manager Mike Carey wasted no time in kicking off. With less than three weeks until the target launch date, Mike conducted daily onboarding sessions with Francesca’s stakeholders to get the website consent experience (Ketch consent management) up and running, fast. Priorities included:

• Using Ketch jurisdictional templates. The Ketch Policy Center includes templates for every major data privacy law, with flexibility to customize according to specific business requirements. Using the Ketch template for CCPA compliance, Francesca’s quickly set up their policy to inform jurisdiction-aware privacy notices for California residents. They can do the same for other U.S. state laws like VCDPA (Virginia), CPA (Colorado), CDPA (Connecticut), and more. 
• Customizing consent banners. The Ketch Experience Center enables marketing and digital teams to completely customize the look and feel of every privacy notice. With just a few clicks (no coding required), Francesca’s Director of Ecommerce Operations, Kristie White, had ready-to-deploy banners to match Francesca’s brand guidelines. 
• Creating a DSR fulfillment workflow: Francesca’s wanted to streamline their data subject rights intake process. Ketch deployed data subject rights automation to give Francesa’s a flexible, scalable solution. Today Francesca’s uses the drag-and-drop workflow editor to create processes and trigger stakeholder tasks. As the business and DSR volume grows, they can add layers of automation: from intake only, to automated execution of the request across all systems.

Kristie was pleased with the Ketch technology and onboarding experience. “Our internal team is small. We need to balance privacy program management with many other initiatives. Using Ketch makes data privacy compliance much easier.” 

Result: regulatory compliance satisfied, with plans for growth

In just two weeks, Francesca’s went from project kick-off to go-live. Today, they’re serving location-aware banners to all website visitors, with customized privacy experiences that comply with specific U.S. state regulations. As Francesca’s business grows, Ketch templates enable them to roll out new policies and privacy notices anytime. 

Francesca’s wants to continue maturing their privacy program tools and processes, leveraging more products in the Ketch platform. Next on the roadmap are:

• Data mapping and discovery. With consent banners in place, Francesca’s can turn towards assessing risks across their data systems and apps. They will use Ketch to perform automated discovery and classification, finding and labeling personal data for a complete understanding of their data footprint and risk exposure. 
• Data subject rights automation. Today, Francesca’s is using Ketch to streamline their manual DSR fulfillment process; but automation is on the horizon. Ketch will enable them to automate the DSR workflow, down to the individual task level, for things like customer identity verification, access and deletion of customer data in individual systems, and API calls. 

Due to the changing regulatory landscape, data privacy compliance may always be a moving target. Relying on a scalable, flexible technology partner makes compliance easier. As Francesca’s serves their 20 million (and growing!) visitors, they can trust Ketch to support business growth.

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