Delete customers’ personal data when it’s necessary to comply with data protection and privacy regulations. We give you examples of common requests and things to consider. That way, you can determine a plan of action for complying with the regulations that matter to you.
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Data protection and privacy regulations can require you to delete customers’ personal data when customers request it, or when it’s no longer necessary to keep. We’ve listed a few of the regulations that are important to many companies collecting and processing their customers’ data.
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), European Union
- Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA), Japan
- Privacy Act, Australia
If you have customers or users who want the data that you’ve collected on them deleted, review these common requests and their related procedures.
| Common Customer Request | Actions to Consider | Things to Consider |
|---|---|---|
| A client of ours moved out of the country, where we’re not licensed to do business. So he wants us to purge his data. | Delete Records |
Delete these records and fields for your client.
If you subscribe to Salesforce CPQ, consider deleting these records if they include your customer’s personal data.
|
| My customer decided to do business with our competitor instead. She asked that we delete her personal data. | Delete Records |
In addition to deleting your customer’s contact or lead record, consider deleting:
And if you maintain a sandbox environment, refresh the environment afterward to remove that customer’s data from it. If you use Salesforce Inbox, delete the contact from Salesforce Inbox, and from any other email system you use, such as Outlook or Gmail. |
| My customer died. The company he worked for requested that we remove him from our systems. | Delete Records | |
| A prospect of mine doesn’t want us to store her email address and phone number. | Manage Leads |
Delete any fields that store your prospect’s email address and phone number. Start with the lead record. If you’ve created other records or activities related to your prospect, make sure that you remove her email address and phone number from those records too. If you subscribe to Sales Cloud Einstein, deleting fields in lead records doesn’t fully delete their content throughout the system. Consider deleting the lead record altogether, which deletes the record and its contents entirely. Then, create another lead record for your prospect, but without any email addresses and phone numbers. |
| A sales rep with my firm no longer works with us. She wants us to remove all her personal information from Salesforce. | Delete Users |
Consider deleting:
We store notifications and any personal data in them for 90 days. Keep in mind that editing personal data in user records doesn’t change the content that appears in those notifications. Salesforce deletes notifications older than 90 days. |
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Sometimes, records related to the data that customers want us to delete links to workflows and other data that we want to retain. How do I avoid disrupting those workflows and creating other problems when I delete associated data? |
Manage Contacts |
Check with your company’s legal counsel on options for making personal data in records obscure instead of deleting the records altogether. A way to make personal data obscure is to change details in the customer’s contact record. So in the record, you’d delete data in all its fields, except for the Account and Last Name fields, which are required. And then for the Last Name field, you’d replace the customer’s name with something like Deleted Contact or Forgotten Contact. |
| For Salesforce Inbox or Einstein Activity Capture, I’d like to delete email and events related to a specific customer. |
If your customer doesn’t want your company to keep any of her information, delete the customer’s personal information from:
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