Mass delete contact information

Determining what and when personal data needs to be deleted

How long you can keep data will depend upon a number of things that are specific to your company and are among the things you define as part of your privacy strategy.

For example, you may decide that you can justify saving the personal information about prospects for three years, and the personal data of lost customers for five years, or something similar.

Perhaps you’ll decide that the time for storing personal data will longer for people who have given their consent to receive marketing information and lost customers that keep on asking your company support questions.

All these conditions and terms you need to clarify and define as part of your GDPR strategy. It is recommended to seek legal advice on such matters to ensure compliance.

Once you have determined the rules that apply for your company, you can use the Selection functionality and the SAINT feature in SuperOffice CRM to help you find the contacts that should be deleted, and them mass delete all contacts that you no longer want to keep in the system.

Find contacts who should be deleted or reviewed with Selections

Selection is a tool to find data in your CRM database that fits a specific set of criteria.

Deleting all the contacts of a certain customer category and that you have not been in contact with for a certain period will help you to keep your database up to date.

You can, for example, create selections of all contacts defined as:

• Prospects;
• Registered before a certain date;
• That have no explicit consents documented;
• That has had no interaction with your company during a given period.

You can search and find contacts that meet more than one criteria, or you can create several selections and then look for the data that is common or different by creating a combined selection.

Selection is a very flexible and powerful tool, once you’ve mastered how to use it. Learn more how to create Selections here.

Use SuperOffice SAINT to review your contacts

You can also use SAINT to help you identify possible contacts that need to be erased.

SAINT stands for “SAles INTelligence” and works by adding some smart algorithms to your CRM data.

Simply put, SuperOffice SAINT monitors the data you have stored in your CRM solution and alerts you to different statuses or action requests that you have defined as important. This may be anything from actions that have not yet happened in a given time, to values that are met or not met, and that you want to be alerted about, so you can take the action required.

SAINT can also be used to monitor contact information.

This means that you can, for example, use SAINT to identify contacts that you haven’t had contact with at all over a given period. This would give you a list of contacts that you may want to remove from your CRM database or treat in a certain way, dependent upon your company’s GDPR policies.

Here is more information on how to set up a SAINT selection.

If you are brand new to SAINT, it may be helpful to use a SuperOffice CRM expert to help you get started. Your local SuperOffice contact can assist you with this.

Mass updating or deleting contacts

Once you have created a list of all the contacts that need to be either updated or deleted it’s time to actually perform the changes you want.

To mass update, say legal basis or similar, you can use the Bulk update feature in your selection’s Task tab.

To mass delete contacts from a selection, you can choose the Delete all contacts feature from the Task button in the bottom-right corner of the main screen.

Note that you need to have the appropriate rights assigned in order to mass delete contacts.

What if you delete contacts by accident?

Deleting contacts can sometimes be tricky. But not to worry, if a contact or a company has been deleted by mistake, you can undo it by using the “Recycle bin”.

Even though a deleted contact or a company are immediately hidden from all users, they are still available for up to 15 days in the recycle bin, from where you can restore a company or a contact that was deleted by mistake.

You’ll find the Recycle bin in your personal Preferences menu. You can see all the contacts that you have deleted, but also all the contacts that were deleted by other users.