Customer insight, transformation and feedback privacy notice

This privacy notice is designed to help you understand how the Council may process your personal data for the purposes of customer insight, transformation and feedback including consultations and surveys.

This privacy notice supplements the key information in, and should be read alongside, the Council's corporate privacy notice.

1. Who are we?

The Council is responsible for delivering a wide range of public services and functions. We value your views and feedback about your experiences with the services you receive from us.

Some of our departments undertake customer insight, transformation and feedback work. This may include carrying out consultations on proposals and surveys and we may also seek individuals who would like to take part in focus group activities.

The aim of this work is to identify improvements that can be made to the services we deliver and achieve best value for our residents.

2. Whose personal data do we process?

Residents
Customers
Visitors
Tenants
Employees
Councillors
Business contacts (sole traders and employees)

3. What type of personal data do we process?

Customer feedback:

Name and email address provided to the Council in your request for services.

Consultations and surveys:

Where possible, these will be conducted anonymously.
If a consultation or survey is anonymous you will be advised of this. If it includes free text boxes, we request that you do not include your personal data in these boxes.
There may be occasions where your personal data is requested, this may include your name, email address, address or telephone number.

Focus groups:

This may include your name, email address, address, telephone number, type of accommodation (i.e. tenant, Council tenant, home owner etc).

Customer insight and transformation:

Personal data provided to the Council may be processed when review and insight project work is carried out to identify trends, patterns and improvements that can be made to the services the Council delivers. This processing will be carried out in the least intrusive way possible, and the outcome of any exercise will be anonymised.

Special Categories of Personal Data:

Sometimes we may collect special category data as part of our obligations for equalities monitoring in consultations and surveys. Where possible, the information collected will be anonymised.

4. Why do we process personal data?

The Council, as a public authority, is under a legal duty to make arrangements for the continuous improvement in the way in which its functions are exercised. This is known as the best value duty. This may require us to consult representatives from the district.

We are also always looking to improve our services. Departments undertaking feedback work may need to process your personal data to contact you about a particular service you have requested. Focus groups may also be set up for this purpose.

Where personal data is collected as part of a particular consultation or survey, the reasons for this will be explained.

Other customer insight and transformation analysis work may be required to identify other areas where our services can be improved. This may look at your reasons for contacting us, your method of contact and how your request was dealt with.

5. Where do we get your personal data from?

Customer feedback, consultations, surveys and focus groups: All personal data processed for this purpose will be obtained from you directly.

Customer insight and transformation: In most cases any personal data analysed for the purposes of identifying trends and patterns will have been provided to us by you directly. There may be limited instances where your personal data has been provided to us by someone else such as a representative, relative or in correspondence with us. However, all personal data will be anonymised as part of this work.

6. Who do we share your personal data with?

Customer feedback, consultations, surveys, transformation and insight work: Your personal data will not be shared outside the Council and access will be limited to those departments with a need to use your personal data.

Focus groups: where you participate in a focus group activity your personal information such as your name, may be shared with other members of the group. This will be made clear to you if this is the case.

After any initial processing of your personal data (such as to contact you to obtain your views or to obtain trend data) findings, patterns and trends will be anonymised in any reports relating to customer insight, transformation and feedback.

The Council may employ a consultant to assist with performing more detailed customer insight and transformation projects. In this case, the consultant will be a data processor.

7. What is the legal basis for using your personal data?

We rely on the following lawful basis to process personal data for customer insight, transformation and feedback purposes:

Consent: You have given consent for us to process your personal data for a specific purpose.
Public Task: The processing is necessary for the Council to perform a task in the public interest or for its official functions with a basis in law.
Legitimate Interests: The processing is necessary for our legitimate interests or the legitimate interests of a third party, unless there is a good reason to protect your personal data which overrides those legitimate interests although this lawful basis cannot apply to the Council's processing of personal data as part of its official tasks.

The legislation that relates to consultations includes, but is not limited to:

Local Government Act 1999
S.111 Local Government Act 1972

Where it is not possible to anonymise special category data collected for equalities monitoring purposes, the lawful basis will be "Reasons of substantial public interest (with a basis in law)"  meeting the condition in Schedule 1, Part 2 of the Data Protection Act 2018 as below:

(8) Equality of opportunity or treatment (Equality monitoring)

The legislation that relates to equalities includes, but is not limited to:
Equalities Act 2010

8. Updates

This privacy notice and the corporate privacy notice are updated from time to time to take account of changes in our services, legal requirements and to make sure they are as transparent as possible, so please check back here for the current version. You can see when this privacy notice was last updated here: May 2023