Automating Notifications

Privacy request management at scale requires your team to think of automation. For this, we created Smart Actions. Smart Actions provide a simple UI in the style of “if-this-then-that” which provides you a way to take an automated action on the privacy request.

Here are the common use-cases of using smart actions:

• Automatically mark the request as “Verified” when a user verifies their email
• Automatically send an internal email for an opt-out request before verification
• Automatically send an internal email for a verified request.
• Automatically send an email to the consumer after completion.

These are very basic use-cases of how to use smart actions. A lot of our customers who have a support team on Jira or Zendesk will create a ticket by sending an email to their support board. If you require complex routing of notifications, read on.

Sending a custom email template

Our email templates are based on merge variables. The variables encased in {{ variable-name }} will be merged-in with the privacy request data at the time of sending the email. That means if your variable is {{ request.consumer_email }}, it will always be replaced with the email of that privacy request. Merge variables can be used in the “Recipient” field, the subject and the body of the Email Template.

We have custom merge variables which can do complex mappings based on the privacy request you receive. For instance, say you have a support team in France. And all french requests need to be sent to that team for processing. You would create a merge variable “matrix with a language dimension” – pretty techy. But all that means is that for “French” you can map it to an email address french-support@yourdomain.com, and for others “support@yourdomain.com”. See the simple “matrix below”:

Merge variable name: support-email-per-language

Language	Value
French	french-support@yourdomain.com
Default	support@yourdomain.com

Now in your email template, in the “Recipient: ” input, just enter {{support-email-per-language}}. And at the time of sending the email for a privacy request, if the privacy request is in french, then it will send to french-support@yourdomain.com, and for all others, to support@yourdomain.com.

This concept of merge variables is extremely powerful as we can create any dimensions you need. For instance, if the requester type is “Employee”, then send it to HR, or if the requester type is “Employee” and the language is French send to “french-hr@yourdomain.com”. Dimensions can be combined providing a very complex mapping. Enterprises with global teams have used this to route the notification accordingly.

Sending emails to consumers about the status of their request

Another type of smart action is to automatically send a notification to the requester. If you wish to fully automate the actual fulfillment of the privacy request, please head over to our integrations section.

If you need to send a different completion reason email to your customer, go ahead and create different email template based on the completed reason: “Fulfilled”, “Marketing Request”, “Out of Jurisdiction” and more all with the “Recipient: {{request.consumer_email}}” set. Then create a merge variable with input type: “Email Template”

Merge Variable name: Completed Email Template To Consumer

Dimension: Completed Reason	Value: Email Template
Fulfilled	Fulfilled Email Template
Marketing Request	Forward To Marketing Email Template
Out of Jurisdiction	Discarded Request Email Template
Default	Default Email Template

In your smart action, you can set a condition: “When the request status is marked as Completed”, “Send an email template ” -> “Merge variables” -> “Completed Email Template To Consumer”

This will effectively send an email to the consumer when you mark the request as completed with a completed reason.

Conclusion

As you can see, merge variables is a powerful tool to create really complex notification mechanisms both internally and to the consumer. If you are not sure how to set it up for your use-case, please contact us, and we’ll happily show you how to set it up.