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Data Deletion for Service Cloud
Delete customers’ personal data collected in customer service cases and other support records to comply with data protection and privacy regulations. We give you examples of common customer requests, so you can determine a plan to comply with the regulations that matter to you.
Required Editions
| Available in: All Editions |
Data protection and privacy regulations can require you to delete customers’ personal data when customers request it, or when it’s not necessary to keep. We’ve listed a few of the regulations that are important to many companies collecting and processing their customers’ data.
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), European Union
- Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA), Japan
- Privacy Act, Australia
If you have customers or users who want the data that you’ve collected on them deleted, review these common requests and the procedures related to them.
| Common Customer Request | Actions to Consider | Things to Consider |
|---|---|---|
| A customer in California is no longer associated with my company, and I want to delete her data. | Delete Records | In addition to deleting your customer’s contact records and cases, consider deleting:
And if you maintain a sandbox environment, refresh the environment afterward so that you remove that customer’s data from it. If you subscribe to Service Cloud Einstein, deleting fields in a record doesn’t fully delete their content throughout the system. Consider deleting the record altogether, which deletes the record and its contents entirely. Then, create another record for your customer, but without the data you want deleted. |
| A field service contractor, technician, or customer is no longer associated with my company, and I want to delete their data. | Get Field Service Data | To find and remove all references to a customer, partner, or employee, perform a global search in Salesforce. After you identify the records that reference the person, you can manually edit or delete the records as needed.  Note Global search
isn’t supported on text fields for these field service objects.
In Salesforce mobile apps, we store notifications and any personal data in them for 90 days. Keep in mind that editing personal data in user records doesn’t change the content that appears in those notifications. Salesforce deletes notifications older than 90 days. |
| A customer with entitlement management is no longer associated with my company, and I want to delete their data. | Report on Entitlements | To find and remove all references to a customer, partner, or employee, perform a global search in Salesforce. After you identify the records that reference the person, you can manually edit or delete the records as needed. Note Global search
isn’t supported on text fields for these entitlement management objects.
|
| A customer doesn’t want their emails stored in a case. | Delete Records | Search and delete all email messages in a case. |
| Someone tweets my company Twitter handle, or posts to our Facebook page, and it creates a case. A contact and account are also created with their Twitter handle or Facebook account. She wants nothing to do with my company and asked that I delete her personal data. | Delete Records | To stop tweets and posts from automatically becoming cases, see Enable Moderation for Social Customer Service |
| Social Customer Service logs and error data include public profile data and content. | Monitor Debug Logs | Log data is deleted automatically after 30 days. |
Sometimes, records related to the data that customers want us to delete links to workflows and other data that we want to retain. How do I avoid disrupting those workflows and creating other problems when I delete associated data? |
Manage Contacts | Check with your company’s legal counsel on options for making personal data in records obscure instead of deleting the records altogether. A way to make personal data obscure is to change details in the customer’s contact record. So in the record, you’d delete data in all its fields, except for the Account and Last Name fields, which are required. And then for the Last Name field, you’d replace the customer’s name with something like Deleted Contact or Forgotten Contact. |
| A customer is no longer associated with my company and wants us to delete their voice call data and other personally identifiable information. | Delete Voice Call Customer Data | Search and delete voice call records, personal information, and call recordings. |
