What should I know before I set up consents?

The following are the pre-requisites you need to know and follow before setting up consents:

1. Identify the data for which you need consent.

The data for which you need to seek consent varies from one business to another. You must seek consent only for the data that is not required for business operations. 
An individual’s email address, phone number, marital status, religion, etc. are considered personal. But some of this personal information might be required for operational reasons. For example, if an individual has bought services from your business, you must retain their name and address on invoices and orders for record-keeping and auditing.
So, classify personal information as essential and non-essential for operational purposes. Also, find out which information is essential only for marketing purposes.
Non-essential personal information needs consents. 

2. Document the uses of personal data.

After identifying the personal data you will be storing, you must record its use in your business. For example:

• Do you refer customers to partners and share their data with them?
• Do you keep voice recordings of customer phone calls for training purposes?

Such uses of personal data require consent. 

3. Remove duplicate contacts with the same email address.

To prevent sending multiple consent requests to the same individual, it is necessary to skip duplicate lead/contact records. Two records are said to be duplicate if they have the same email address. 
This task can be arduous if you have thousands of contacts. Fortunately, Vtiger CRM makes it easy by automatically flagging the duplicate contacts by:

• Setting their Status field to Duplicate
• Retaining the last modified contact as the primary one 

A CRM administrator will be prompted to approve this automated process while enabling the Consents module.

4. Choose From Name and From Email to send consent requests.

To send consent requests, you must first set up the From Name and the From Email address. Follow these steps to set them up:

1. Click the User Menu on the top right corner of the screen.
2. Click the Settings button.
3. Select Email Settings under Configuration.
4. Click the Edit icon on the Email Settings page.
5. Scroll down to the Double opt-in and Consent Emails section.
6. Enter From Name and From Email.
7. Click Save.

5. Understand the risks of losing data.

When a contact denies you permission to store their personal data, you must erase their data from the CRM. The value in the personal fields must be erased when consent is deleted for a field.

To learn more about consents, click here.