Personal data may be acquired by a business about an individual person in a number of ways. For example, a person may submit a form on your website, meet you at an event, or be included in a purchased list. Regardless of how you obtain data about the person, they may have specific preferences about how you store, process, or use that data. Regulations are starting to be put in place like the European Union law on data protection and privacy (General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR) as well as other privacy protection laws such as The California Online Privacy Protection Act (CalOPPA). Some businesses are not subject to those regulations, but choose to honor their customer’s privacy preferences as a matter of course.
A customer may have several records in your Salesforce instance like Lead and Contact records. Some of the information may contain personal information which is becoming more and more regulated while other information may just need to remain confidential. A customer’s preferences may be updated on one Lead record, but not another, or not on a Contact or Person Account record. In order to best honor your customer’s preferences, a centralized location related to all of their records can be used to keep their preferences up to date.
In the Spring ‘18 Release, Salesforce implemented a standard object, named “Individual,” that became available in All Editions. This new object allows data privacy preferences to be tracked for any objects (including custom objects) on the Salesforce platform. Think of this object as a way to save an individual’s data privacy preferences that can be used when communicating with Leads, Contacts, and Person Accounts. By using this object, Salesforce is helping us to honor customers’ wishes. You can track and store preferences for:
- Collecting, storing, and sharing their personal data
- Packaging their personal data so they can take ownership of it
- Deleting records and personal data related to them
- Solicitation of products and services
- Tracking their geolocation and web activity
- Consent and other lawful basis reasons for why personal information is being processed
Additionally, you can add custom fields to Individual for any additional preferences or processes that you may need for your organization.
Consent & Right to be Forgotten
For the rest of this blog, we are going to focus on two key principles of GDPR: Consent and the Right to be Forgotten. A customer may at any time retract permission (or no longer give their consent) for contacting them via phone, or request that you delete their personal information. Standard or custom fields such as “Do Not Call” or “Request to be Forgotten” can be used on Leads and Contacts as well as Individuals to honor those requests.
Say for example a rep calls a customer and the customer states their preference to not be contacted by phone. The rep can flag a field on Lead, “Do Not Call.” Or, if a customer reaches out and requests the deletion of their data, a rep can flag the “Request to be Forgotten” field on the Lead. Once a flag is checked, the related Individual record should be automatically updated. This can easily be achieved by Rollup Helper.
We are going to walk through both use cases step by step. Before beginning, it is a best practice to ensure that the Lead, Contact, etc, records are related to Individual records so that updates can accurately be made to an Individual based on a change to a Lead or Contact. A simple way to automate relating Lead or Contact records to Individual records is to use Lookup Helper: Check out our tutorial “Automatically Create and Relate Individual Records in Salesforce” to learn how.
