I meet a lot of business owners whose eyes glaze when I tell them what I do. To be honest, data protection and the GDPR seems to be a pretty good antidote to insomnia!
But I always persist – I think the data protection legislation is a great tool and enabler to doing good business and using your customer and contact information well.
Let me ask you a quick question. If you’re good at what you do, why wouldn’t you want to tell people about it?
But how to do that and meet your data protection responsibilities? The legislation is quite clear - you need to let everyone, who is potentially going to use your business, know why you want their personal information.
But where do you start and how do you let them know?
You need to have a privacy notice. This is a short document that uses clear and plain language to answer your customers’ questions on why, what and how you need their precious details. This should include how much of their personal information you want them to give you, what you’re going to do with it, how you’re going to store it and how long you’re going to keep it.
And where do you put this? Definitely on your website, if you have one, or you could have it as a poster in your shop or office, send it to your customers or include it in your terms and conditions. You just need to make sure that it’s freely available to everyone.
Here are a few bullet points on what you need to include in your privacy notice:
- Name and contact details of who is responsible for the personal information in your business
- What type of information that you want from your contacts – do you need just name and email address or something more?
- How you get that information – is this direct from your customers/contacts or do you get information from third parties?
- Why you have it – do you need consent for marketing purposes, or are you fulfilling an order or contract?
- What you’re going to do with that information – is this so that you can send out your products or do you need it for a customer database so that you can provide after-sales service?
- How you store that information – will it be kept securely, will you share or transfer that information and what do you do when it’s no longer needed?
- You also need to let your customers know about their rights under the data protection legislation.
- And finally, you need to give your customers the ability to request access to the information you’re holding about them and if they’re not happy, how they can make a complaint
The Information Commissioner’s website (ico.org.uk) has all the information you need to create your own privacy notice and every business should have one. It’s simple to create, but if you want some practical support, we’ve now created an online service that will help – GDPR Value.
GDPR Value is a quick and easy 2-part process. Firstly, a 15 minute course that will help you understand your data protection responsibilities, and second, a link to a set of 38 questions that will help us create your tailored privacy notice as well as giving you a record of what your business does with personal information.
I’m committed to helping business owners meet their data protection responsibilities as well as making the legislation as pain-free as possible for all my clients, so if you want to know more, just get in touch at hello@businesstamer.co.uk or 0207 294 7599.