Dorset Council Customer Insights privacy notice

At Dorset Council, we care about your privacy. This notice explains how the information we collect about you is used and your rights in relation to that information.

What your information will be used for

We always want to improve our services. Gathering and studying this information will show us what we need to work on and the areas for improvement. 

The Data Controller is Dorset Council. 

How long we will keep your information

We will keep Customer Insights data for 3 years.

After this timeframe, the data will be permanently and securely deleted from our records. This ensures that we only keep your information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes for which it was collected and in accordance with legal and regulatory requirements.

Where will your information be stored

• online – on a cloud-based data centre (Achieve/Granicus)
• telephone – on our telephony partner, Five9’s, servers for 60 days, thereafter in Dorset Councils Data Warehouse

Keeping your information secure

We have appropriate security measures in place to prevent information from being accidentally lost or used or accessed in an unauthorised way. We limit access to your information to those who have a genuine business need to know it. Those processing your information will do so only in an authorised manner and are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We also have procedures in place to deal with any suspected data security breach. We will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected data security breach where we are legally required to do so.

If you want to find out more about protecting your personal information, visit Get Safe Online which is supported by HM Government and leading businesses.

Information from other sources

Surveys or feedback forms

•  online surveys: we might ask you to complete a survey by email or on our website
•  phone surveys: we might ask you to answer a few questions over the phone

Customer reviews

• online reviews: such as Google reviews
• social media feedback: we pay attention engagement on our social media channels

User satisfaction 

We will evaluate customer contentment through a 5 point scale, spanning from highly satisfied to extremely dissatisfied. Utilising this valuable data will empower us to enhance and refine our services

Customer interviews

We might have a one-on-one talk to understand specific issues or get detailed feedback.

Customer support interactions

We look at how you interact with our support teams, like chats, emails, and phone calls.

Customer complaints and compliments

We have a formal compliments and complaints procedure.

Customer journey mapping

We may visualise and analyse your entire experience with us to find areas for improvement and use the data to manage and improve the delivery of service.

Purpose for collecting and utilising your personal information

We justify the collection and utilisation of your personal data based on the lawful grounds of performing a public task.

Your rights

Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation, you have several important rights that may be exercised free of charge. In summary, those include rights to:

• fair processing of information and transparency over how we use your use personal information
• access to your personal information and to certain other supplementary information that this privacy notice is already designed to address
• require us to correct any mistakes in your information which we hold
• require the erasure of personal information concerning you in certain situations
• receive the personal information concerning you which you have provided to us, in a structured, commonly used, and machine-readable format and have the right to transmit those data to a third party in certain situations
• object at any time to processing of personal information concerning you for direct marketing
• object in certain other situations to our continued processing of your personal information
• otherwise restrict our processing of your personal information in certain circumstances

For further information on each of those rights you can visit the Information Commissioner's Office website.

If you would like to exercise any of those rights, contact our Data Protection Officer.

In order that we can comply with such a request as soon as possible, it would be useful if you could provide the following information within your initial request:

• enough information to identify you (e.g. email address)
• proof of your identity and address (a copy of your driving licence or passport and a recent utility or credit card bill), and
• the information to which your request relates

If you would like to unsubscribe from any email newsletter you can also click on the ‘unsubscribe’ button located at the bottom of the email. It may take up to up to 28 days for this to take place.

How to complain

We hope that our Data Protection Officer can resolve any query or concern you raise about our use of your information.

The UK General Data Protection Regulation also gives you right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. The supervisory authority in the UK is the Information Commissioner's Office.