In the wake of GDPR, businesses are taking measures to keep their CRM data accurate and up-to-date. But, many businesses, without realising, fail in their efforts to be compliant because of one common problem – duplicate records.
How do duplicate contact records jeopardise your efforts to comply with GDPR?
Let’s say you’ve saved contact details of one of your customers, Matthew McLeon two times. One record has Matthew McLeon as the name, email ID, and date of birth. And the other record has Matt McLeon as the name, email ID, date of birth, and phone number.
Matthew wants to know what personal information you are holding. You look into the CRM, find the first contact with Matthew McLeon as the name, and tell him that you have his email ID, date of birth and home address. You’re unaware that there is another record that holds his phone number. After a few months, you call Matthew to tell him about a offer. But, Matthew is annoyed as he was not informed that you had his number – clearly breaking GDPR.
This is just one example of how duplicates can wreck your GDPR compliance efforts.
How to deal with duplicates?
If you’re using Vtiger, then auditing CRM data for duplicates is an easy task. Vtiger’s duplicate management tool lets you prevent, detect, merge, and delete duplicate records.
With Vtiger you can:
Automatically find hidden duplicates: In the previous example, if you had opened Matthew’s record in Vtiger CRM, you would have been instantly alerted of a duplicate record. And once you’re made aware, Vtiger lets you to merge or delete the duplicate record to ensure that you have a single customer view.
Prevent duplicate record creation: Vtiger gives you a “set-it-and-forget-it” way to prevent duplicate records. You can tell Vtiger what field/s – last name, email ID, phone number – in the contact record are considered unique, and Vtiger automatically warns you when you try to save another record with the same value.
Handle duplicates during import: To maintain CRM data integrity, Vtiger automatically checks for duplicates before importing data from other sources. If duplicates are detected, you are instantly alerted to take appropriate action.
Get rid of existing duplicates: At any time, you can check for existing duplicate contacts in two clicks. When commissioned, Vtiger quickly traces out records that share identical field values and displays the result. You can either delete duplicate records or merge them together.
Use these four deduplication methods to ensure that your CRM data never gets in your way of GDPR compliance.
We understand that being GDPR compliant is your top priority! To help you in your effort, we’ve built the Privacy Guard – a tool that lets you comply effortlessly with GDPR by automating the process of obtaining, storing, and utilising your customers’ consents and encrypting their sensitive data at rest. It also allows you to define data handling policies and gives you the ability to audit user access with ease.
Have any questions about handling duplicate records or keeping your CRM data GDPR ready? Leave us a comment in the box below, or send us an email at [email protected].
