The recent introduction of the GDPR  has meant a great deal of work for any company that holds and processes data on its staff, customers and suppliers, and we've been proactively developing new features that will help our customers reach compliance with the new legislation.

For retailers, the GDPR has meant an evaluation of what data they hold on their customers, how they track their consent to receive marketing communications, and what to do if an individual requests a copy of any data held or wishes to have their data deleted.

To help manage these new requirements and requests, we have enhanced the data management facilities within bsmart² to allow the extract and printing of all of a customer’s details, and deletion of that customer data if required together with an audit trail of those actions and new methods of gathering consent for marketing.

At point-of-sale, a pop-up window appears when a new customer is created to remind the counter staff to ask for the customer’s consent to marketing, by email, post, telephone, SMS or other method. For existing customers, staff can be prompted to update consent if a purchase is made after a set period of time. Custom text can be added to guide the operator through the consent process, such as privacy policies and unsubscribe methods.

Within bsmart, the Customer Marketing module has new functions to enable the retailer to give a customer a copy of all the personal data held on the system. That data may be deleted (complete with audit trail) or amended to the customer’s request.