How do I clean my database of old customers?

Removing a customer's details from your record is an effective means of tidying your database and a process that you may need to complete on a regular basis in line with your organisation's Privacy Policy. Before starting this process you will need to consider what, if any, information needs to be retained. With this in mind, there are two options we can help you with:

• Complete removal of the Customer's Record

• Anonymising Customer Data for Marketing Use

Want to clean up your database but not delete customers? You might instead want to look at cleaning your database of duplicate Customer Records. This process involves identifying duplicates and then merging them together. For more info read our guide on merging a large amount of duplicate Customer Records.

Complete removal of the Customer Record

This is the most commonly requested option. Customer Records will be purged from your account, but order history data will still be retained. This will be put under the 'Unknown Customer' record that you will have in your account (like when an order is processed but no customer has been assigned).

Anonymising personal data for marketing use

This option is best for if you still wish to retain some customer information for Marketing/Reporting purpose. This works by retaining the unique customer records, removing all information that could identify an individual (name, address, email, phone etc.), but leaving general fields like 'postcode' in place.

What you need to do?

1. You need to decide which of the two options suits your needs best. Be certain what you request is correct, as this is a irreversible process and destroyed data can not be recovered. 

2. You then need to decide which customer records will be anonymised or deleted. This will be in line with your own Privacy Policy and how you say you will store customer data. Every business or venue's policy will vary, but in most cases you would be looking at anonymising or deleting customers who haven't purchased within a set period of time (e.g. customers that haven't booked for 3/4/5 years). 

3. Once you are ready, you will need to find the Customer Records that need anonymising or deleting. Contact the Support Team and ask us to help set up a Your Report that includes all customer records that fall within the parameters of which customers you want to anonymise or delete.

4. Once the Your Report is set up, we will pull a CSV file and send it to you via a secure platform.

5. We will ask you to check that the customers in the CSV are the correct ones that require anonymising or deleting.

6. Once you have checked that the Customer Records included in the report are correct, you'll need to let us know. If you are anonymising records rather than deleting, you'll need to tell us what data fields you want to remove and what you want to keep.

7. The Support Team will complete this process for you and confirm when complete.

Want to know more?

• Merging duplicate customer records
• Merging a large amount of duplicate Customer Records