Remove/anonymize customers in ChordOMS
/This article is for Autonomy customers only. Performance and Data-only customers should refer to other articles or contact Chord regarding data management.
Chord OMS contains many pieces of personal information about customers (i.e. the consumers who make purchases via Chord merchants). Customer data is owned by merchants and merchants have ultimate accountability over all customer data. Since Chord stores the data, Chord acts as a 'data custodian' with responsibility to safeguard customer's personal information.
Occasionally, customers request that their data be removed from Chord OMS. Now, ChordOMS provides an easy method for handling removal requests from customers. The customer anonymization process will remove or anonymize all of a customer's personally identifiable information in Chord OMS. Upon completion, the customer will be effectively removed from Chord OMS and the user cannot be personally identified by any data retained in Chord OMS.
Removing/anonymizing customer data is an irreversible process. Once completed, it is impossible to recover the user record and related data. If a removed/anonymized user wishes to transact with your store again, they must create a new customer account. Chord cannot provide support to restore customers that were removed.
To maintain data integrity, customers cannot be deleted in Chord OMS. Deleting a user would result in many records (e.g. orders, shipments, subscriptions) becoming 'orphaned' and no longer linked to a specific customer. That data can no longer be used for modelling purposes in the data warehouse, reducing the accuracy and completeness of reports used to make business decisions. Therefore, when removing a customer from Chord OMS, some attributes and records will be deleted while others will be securely anonymized.
The following steps occur when a customer is removed/anonymized from ChordOMS:
- All store credits and gift cards are invalidated. Refunds will not be automatically provided - all refunds must be completed before removing/anonymizing the user.
- All subscriptions (standard and pre-paid) are cancelled.
- Personally identifiable attributes are deleted or anonymized (see the "Affected Data" table below on what data gets updated).
- A User Deletedevent is emitted to the CDP (e.g. Segment). Merchants can configure Segment downstream destinations to handle this event as appropriate. The workflow neither removes nor requests to remove data in downstream systems (beyond emitting the User Deleted event). Merchants are accountable for removing customer data from these systems.
- ChordOMS instructs Segment to supress and delete the user from its internal database. More details can be found in the Segment documentation.
The table below indicates what fields are blanked, anonymized or retained when a customer is removed:
Entity | Anonymized Attributes | Blanked Attributes | Retained Attributes |
|---|---|---|---|
Customer (user) | | | |
| login | api_key | |
| | stripe_user_id | |
| | unconfirmed_email | |
| | name | |
| | phone | |
| | date_of_birth | |
Orders | phone | | |
Addresses | | firstname | city |
| | lastname | state_name |
| | address1 | zipcode |
| | address2 | |
| | phone | |
| | alternative_phone | |
| | name | |
Credit cards | | name | cc_type |
| | month | gateway_customer_profile_id |
| | year | gateway_payment_profile_id |
| | last_digits | |
Pre-launch signups | name | | |
Referrals | | | |
Stock requests | | | |
Prepaid subscription | recipient email | | |
Promotion codes | | | |
Gift cards | recipient_email | name | |
| | purchaser_name | |
1. View the customer in ChordOMS and click the Anonymize user data button.
2. Review the confirmation message, input the customer's email address, and click Confirm.
3. You will see a message at the bottom of the screen stating that the customer removal job will execute in the background.
4. The user has been removed from Chord OMS and will no longer be visible on the Customers page.
However, their record remains in Chord OMS but with anonymized personal information. Viewing orders associated with the removed user show that the personal information was anonymized/removed.
