Are you planning to get a new customer retention management (CRM) platform for managing all your customers? Here’s a short explanation on how to make this process legal and safe.

GDRP protects users from unauthorized data collection and further processing for commercial purposes. If you have a customer retention management program that is not really done correctly, you are likely not going to comply with the GDPR standards with your CRM.

The first thing to consider is choosing a custom solution for your CRM.

What’s the best way to handle this situation? How will you implement and pick up the right CRM for your startup or business. Begin by choosing a custom solution for your CRM. If you have a startup with a limited budget, you may be confused with this variant.

You may need a company familiar with what has to be done to comply with the GDPR in order to attain the qualifications that you wish to have in your organization.

You’ll want to analyze the software development costs to get the CRM that will meet your requirements without any extra paid functionality. This is the minimum you will want to do in your organization for cost and time efficiency.

GDPR compliance and CRM.

If you need to collect user data but you are not aware of all the GDPR standards, you will want someone who can give you a short guide to its essentials:

1. GDPR is for all companies from tiny startups to huge corporations.
2. It’s valid for all residents of EU no matter where you are located and where the data is collected.
3. Personal information comprises a name, address, phone number, family status, habits, interests, etc.
4. You will need to comply with GDPR standards if you keep any of the user data.

In any business, you will want to become familiar with what it all means. Even if you store a person’s name and email address, you should comply with the GDPR right away. Privacy issues should be considered at the beginning stages of designing the architecture of the future CRM platform you will use. It’s good to hire experienced individuals who have had a similar experience in the past with building a site or the part of business that will manage your CRM.

If you don’t want to create an IT team in your company, you can choose the variant of outsourcing to the Ukraine. You will get a custom solution with a specific set of features for collecting, storing and processing user data. You can also legally manage the data and grant limited access to your sales team.

Learn how to collect user data with a CRM.

You should have specific purposes for using the information that people leave on your website or in your applications. Purposeless collection of the information is restricted by GDPR standards. How can you set a clear purpose? For example, you may want to send regular newsletters and blog posts. Newsletters and blog posts are a legitimate purpure for which your customers will be signing up and giving their permissions.

You should be able to prove that people from your contact list have accepted your proposal to send them something. This means you have their opt-in form clicking on the permission to send emails — or how you will use their data for some specific reasons. A CRM platform should be able to record this approval to let you provide what your customer is asking for and their permission profile — on demand.

If you have a person in your contact list for sending newsletters or anything else, you should provide people with the opportunity to make any updates to their profiles. For example, you may add a link to updating subscription preferences at the bottom of the email.

A link to unsubscribe from your newsletter or site should be in a prominent place on your site. Obscure buttons on your site are not a savvy business move; hidden buttons cause a lot of mistrust among your clients and customers.

You can also add opportunities to let subscribers choose what kind of content they choose to receive from you. It’s obvious that people won’t unsubscribe from valuable newsletters and content. But your customers and clients will be gone in a snap if you turn your emails into spam and send them too often. A good CRM system can improve your email marketing campaigns — and all areas of your business.

Processing user data with CRM

When you have a huge database, you can create a 360-degree customer overview to enhance your marketing strategy or to build a new one. The more you know about your clients the more value you can offer to them. So how can you process this valuable information in a legal way that will benefit both of you — you and your client?

CRM lets you process huge amounts of data at once. You may have a few categories of users and maybe you have decided to make some updates to their information. If you need user approval to make these updates — it will be easy to send a notification email — see the click-through rate and the open rate.

You will analyze the behavior of your clients and how they are likely to react to your request. Is your client or customers more likely to approve or decline your proposal to collect and process their personal information? You can quickly change your offer if you see a large number of unsubscribed users. You can analyze at what stage your customers balk on your site and change how your site is set up at this point on the site. Or you can change what you are offering or rearrange the campaign you are running.

The bottom line

CRM is compliant with GDPR if you are honest with your clients and you have clear purposes for using information that you get. SaaS CRM will let you save money by not having to rent servers or hire IT experts for maintaining your platform work. Nothing is difficult with custom solutions and can provide you with clear productive solutions so that you will have the time to spend growing your business.

Dmitry Reshetchenko

Dmitry Reshetchenko is a Junior Outreach Specialist for Diceus, a technology partner for developing enterprise solutions. He is passionate in his belief that a partnership with IT blogs is of great importance. Dmitry works mostly with Tech blogs.