When fully adopted and running at its best, your CRM will be chock full of customer data—everything from names and email addresses to potentially sensitive information. This makes it a treasure trove of information for your business—and a prime target for hackers.

In short: If your organization is not vigilant, your CRM could be a major data privacy risk.

Why Your CRM is a Target for Data Security Threats

The most effective CRM systems depend on accurate collection of high-quality data. The benefits to the organization are clear (customer insights, personalized experiences), but the downside is that your CRM is now the ideal target for cybercriminals. Businesses of all sizes have come under attack and lost valuable personal data to hackers.

The ability to harness the data you have in your CRM can be transformative. But, “with great power comes great responsibility.” Your business is on the hook to ensure the collected data is used both ethically and securely.

Data Privacy Laws and Your Compliance Checklist

Any company collecting data needs to be transparent about how the data is collected, stored, and used. That’s not just good business practice; in many cases, it’s the law.

• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): This EU regulation mandates explicit consent before collecting data, provides data portability, and makes it easy for individuals to request their information be modified or deleted at any time.
• California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA): Applicable primarily to California businesses, this act grants consumers the right to know what data is being collected, as well as the right to request data be deleted.
• Global Data Protection: Many other states and countries (Canada, India, Australia) have similar regulations. While each has unique requirements, the basic core tenet to protect individuals’ data remains the same.

No matter which regulation(s) your company must comply with, non-compliance typically comes with pricey fines, damage to your org’s reputation, and significant loss of customer trust.

Keeping Your CRM Secure: Best Practices

Your CRM has a lot of important, valuable data. You want that data, and hackers do too. So it’s your job to make sure your CRM does not become a data privacy risk.

Non-Negotiable Data Security:

• Use a trusted and reliable CRM vendor that employs data encryption and provides secure access controls.
• The system must be demonstrably compliant with relevant data privacy laws and regulations.

Ensuring Ongoing Compliance:

• Regular Compliance Audits: Review your CRM practices on a regular basis to make sure they’re in alignment with relevant laws and regulations.
• Document Data Practices: Keep detailed records of how you collect, store, and use customer data.
• Train, Train, Train: Make sure your employees fully grasp how important compliance is and know how to follow regulations. 

Navigating Access Permissions

Most CRM systems allow customers to control access permissions and restrict certain users from accessing particular data. Balance is key:

• Start by assuming everyone should have access to everything, then begin removing specific types of access from individuals and roles that don’t have a business need to access those specific areas.
• Use safeguards, but don’t overuse them to the point that users find workarounds that invalidate the security safeguards anyway.

Ethical Data Collection and Data Minimization

Staying in compliance with data privacy regulations also means adopting ethical data collection practices:

• Collect Only What’s Necessary: Apply data minimization. You only need to collect the minimum amount of personal data necessary for specified and legitimate business purposes.
• Define the Data’s Purpose: Make it clear why you’re collecting data, and ensure its use is compatible with your disclosed purposes.
• Implement Data Retention Policies: Have clear data retention periods for your data categories based on both business need and legal obligation. As soon as data is no longer needed, delete or anonymize it.

Final Thoughts on Updating CRM Data Securely

One final thing that can help ensure your data remains accurate and secure? Is making it easier to update and manage that data right from where you’ll get a lot of updates: your email.

ExtendSync works with both Outlook and Gmail to allow users to not only sync important emails to NetSuite contact records, but also create, edit, and delete accurate contact records right from their inboxes.

Not only that, ExtendSync leverages native NetSuite permissions. This means that if a user can’t see specific NetSuite records within NetSuite, they can’t access them via ExtendSync in their inbox, either. It’s a win-win for keeping data accurate, up-to-date, and secure.

Try it for yourself with no obligation for two weeks. Get started here.