Contact Point Filtering: The Missing Piece in Your Consent-Aware Data Strategy
Consent management is a critical component of modern data strategy, as it’s necessary to ensure that organizations handle personal data in a lawful, transparent, and ethical manner. L1, L2, L3, and L4 consent levels refer to different layers of consent for data usage, typically within the context of data privacy and protection regulations. These levels exist to provide individuals with granular control over how their personal data is used by organizations. Here’s a breakdown of each level:
L1 (Level 1) Consent
Description: Basic consent for essential data processing necessary to provide a service or product, including fulfilling contractual obligations. Purpose: Ensures fundamental operations and service delivery.
L3 (Level 3) Consent
Description: Consent for marketing and promotional activities, including targeted advertising, direct marketing, and sharing data with third parties for marketing purposes. Purpose: Enables personalized and targeted marketing efforts, increasing the relevance of marketing campaigns.
L2 (Level 2) Consent
Description: Consent for additional, non-essential data processing to enhance user experience and improve service quality, such as personalized recommendations and basic analytics. Purpose: Allows organizations to improve services and provide a better user experience without extensive data processing.
L4 (Level 4) Consent
Description: Consent for advanced data processing activities, such as detailed profiling, extensive analytics, and sharing data with multiple third parties, which have a higher impact on privacy. Purpose: Provides the ability to conduct sophisticated data-driven activities while ensuring individuals have clear control over their data.
As architects, it’s very important to keep the levels of consent in mind as you design solutions in Data Cloud that require usage of data tied to different levels of consent. Salesforce Data Cloud allows you to manage L1 and L2 consent natively but historically L3 & L4 consent was handled by downstream post-processing. With the newly released feature of contact point filtering in Data Cloud you can now natively manage your L3 and L4 consent just in Data Cloud. This feature ensures that your consent filters are honored whenever data is being activated downstream.
In this blog post, we will address the ideal data model to support L3 and L4 consent in Data Cloud and the Contact Point filter functionality that utilizes that data to ensure consent is honored appropriately during activation.
Recommended Data Model
In Salesforce Data Cloud, L3 (Explicit Consent) and L4 (Verified Explicit Consent) consents are typically managed using specialized objects that are part of Salesforce’s consent management framework. The key objects involved in storing and managing these consents include:
- ContactPointTypeConsent: This object captures the consent status for different types of contact points (e.g., email, phone) for an individual.
- ContactPointConsent: This object captures consent information at a more granular level, storing details about the individual’s consent for specific communication channels.
- ComunicationSubscriptionConsent: This object captures information about consent for a specific contact point. This data includes when, how, for how long, and whether the party has double opted-in.
Contact Point Consent
In the Data Cloud Data Model Reference Guide, it suggests that Consent Status and Data Use Purpose should not be stored directly on the Contact Point Consent DMO but instead should provide a reference ID to the Consent Status and Data Use Purpose DMO respectively. For Contact Point Filtering, Consent Status and Data Use Purpose should be stored directly on the Contact Point Consent DMOs(see below). Rather than using a reference ID, the model should be architected such that the exact values for Consent Status and Data Use Purpose should be stored on the L3 Contact Point Consent DMO.
Communication Subscription Consent
Similar to the Contact Point Consent DMO, for Communication Subscription Consent DMO, Communication Subscription and Consent Status values should be stored directly on the Communication Subscription Consent DMO directly instead of referencing or storing the data in a separate DMO.
How Data Cloud helps unblock with Contact point filtering
Now that the appropriate Data Model has been set up, let’s see how we can use Contact Point filtering to Contact Point to ensure that consent is honored during activation and that audiences that are created have the correct contacts.
a. Control which contact point you want to reach your audience with
After channel source selection is completed, you will now have an additional option of filtering on the contact point card.
b. Control which contact point you want to reach your audience with
After channel source selection is completed, users will now have an additional option of filtering on the contact point card.
What attributes can you use to filter?
- Users are able to select on all attributes from the Contact Point channel you have selected to filter on (Email, Phone, Push, etc.)
- Users are also able to use attributes from the L3 & L4 Consent DMO
- Contact Point Consent (L3)
- Contact Point Subscription Consent (L4)
c. Control which contact point you want to reach your audience with
After channel selection is completed and filters have been applied, users will now have an additional option of sorting which helps decide which of your contact points should be selected.
What does Sort By do?
- After applying your filters, you may still have more than one Contact Point that fulfills the requirement. Sort By helps you decide which out of your Contact Points should be selected.
- Users are able to use any Attributes from the Contact Point DMO you are sorting on as a Sort By Attribute
- In the Sort By drop down, all attributes from the DMO will be displayed
- Values can be sort by using Ascending or Descending order
d. Activate your consent-honored audience
Conclusion
For architects designing solutions in Data Cloud, L3, and L4 consent are critical not only for compliance but it also allows you to effectively use personal data for marketing, compliance, and personalized services. With Data Cloud’s Contact point filtering feature you now have more control over honoring consent(L1-L4) without creating any downstream processing efforts, and allows companies to responsibly manage user data while maximizing its value in a manner that respects user preferences and regulatory requirements.
Written by
