While using a free CRM solution, it’s imperative that you collect and manage personal data of your contacts, both potential and existing, in a secure way. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) offers you information about regulation and comprehension of the privacy rights of confidential customer data and its legal aspects. Therefore, it’s highly recommended that you look for legal recourse and have a consultation with a number of GDPR resources to make sure your business complies with all data privacy laws.
In point of fact, GDPR can exert a noticeable influence on the way businesses take to collecting, storing, and securing personal data of customers. What makes the scenario more advantageous is the fact that free CRM software architecture and GDPR have plenty of commonalities, the most important being the facet of developing and nurturing trust and loyalty with prospects and existing customers by handling personal data in a professional manner.
Nowadays, with the whole world gearing up to usher in the New Year, all leading CRM vendors are busy fabricating and rolling out new GDPR compliant features to offer support to their clients and make them fall in line with legal nitty-gritty as far as vital, private customer data is concerned.
Here are 4 ways by which you can be in charge of customer data in 2020.
1. Managing personal data
Whatever customer data is fed into a free CRM system it’s in essence personal data. The kind of processing such data entails depends on its precise type. For instance, elementary data like name, address, phone number are more generic in nature and can be accessed by all employees of the company.
Conversely, critical and highly confidential data like personal contracts and agreements, bank account information, tax information, etc. call for enhanced security and user access based on the relevance of the user.
With ultra-modern free CRM software functionality, it’s possible to establish automated, routinized rules that pinpoint how various kinds of personal data need to be handled by your company.
2. Managing customer consent
Every business should come up with a predefined purpose for the collection of customer-centric information. This is a key prerequisite of GDPR. The purpose or intent should be backed by a legal basis at all times. The legal basis can take the form of:
- A contractual obligation
- A genuine interest to store and use data
- Consent received from a customer explicitly
Whenever a company benefits from the consent given by a customer as a legal basis for the collection and storage of personal data, GDPR demands the company to come up with an authentic and justifiable proof that the consent, in the first place, has been granted by the customer.
With the help of a free CRM, it’s possible to:
- Digitally store details of the consent as put forward by each contact
- Testify the legal basis of storing the information
- Preserve the source, let’s say a web form, wherefrom the consent is received
- Keep a record of who gets the information updated and when
3. Managing subscription
As stated by GDPR, even though contact can give consent for receiving information about several ongoing or upcoming email marketing campaigns from your company, the same bears the suitable authority as well to make an objection to or wriggle out from receiving any future marketing promotional or communications.
The new functionality of a free CRM software system enables both potential and existing customers to make a decision by themselves in relation to:
- The precise type of information they’d like to receive
- The type of content they aren’t keen on receiving
This information can be in the form of blog post updates, product training material, or white papers.
The new feature may also allow you to send decidedly targeted emails to all your subscribers depending on their individual interests. When it comes to email marketing campaigns, this is something that GPDR always promotes. Also, as far as email marketing is concerned the concept of highly targeted emails is eagerly pursued or sought after. This is because of the reason that email campaigns set apart based on target segments can improve the outcomes of your email marketing efforts to a significant extent.
4. Managing bulk updates
The preliminary features of a free CRM system were aimed at making your customer database comply with GDPR. What’s needed next is to find an effective means of updating all personal data in the latest GDPR domain. This can be accomplished after you have carried out an in-depth assessment of your customer database vis-à-vis the kind of personal information it carries, its origin, the legal basis for keeping it stored, and the specific configuration in which the data needs to be handled.
With the intervention of a bulk update feature of free CRM software, you can fine-tune and put your database in order in a simple, straightforward manner. Instead of getting personal records updated one by one, which is very time-consuming, with the bulk update feature in place you can formulate specific rules to define the purpose, origin, legal basis, and date in numerous records in just a single click. This, as a consequence, saves you plenty of time.
