Sound familiar?
When your CRM is a compliance liability
Cannot answer a data subject access request quickly
A customer requests to know what data you hold. It takes 3 days of manual searching across the CRM, ERP, email platform, and marketing tools. The regulation gives you 30 days. You are using them all.
No consent records exist for most contacts
The CRM has 40,000 contacts. Nobody knows which have provided consent, for what processing purpose, through which channel, or when that consent was obtained.
Data retention policy does not exist in the CRM
Contacts added 7 years ago are still active marketing targets. There is no suppression automation, no archive policy, and no audit trail of retention decisions.
Previous audit findings have not been remediated
A regulatory body or external DPO audit identified gaps 12 months ago. The findings are documented. Remediation has not been prioritised. The exposure has grown.
Personal data in fields it was never meant to be in
Free text fields contain sensitive personal information -- health conditions, salary details, personal circumstances -- entered informally and never reviewed. You do not know it is there.
No documented lawful basis for processing different contact types
Prospects, customers, partners, and former employees all processed under the same assumptions. No documented lawful basis per processing activity. A regulator would find this on first inspection.
Why this happens
"CRM compliance fails because data protection was never treated as a configuration requirement. It was assumed the CRM was compliant by default. It is not."
GDPR and GDPR/CCPA do not require compliant software -- they require compliant processes implemented in software. The CRM is not GDPR-compliant because the vendor says so. It is compliant when consent is captured and stored correctly, retention policies are enforced automatically, data subject rights requests are fulfilled within regulatory timelines, and every processing decision can be traced to a documented lawful basis. None of these happen by default. All of them require deliberate configuration.
The Celumai approach
How we make your CRM demonstrably compliant
What we use to fix this
The services we combine for CRM compliance
Compliance is a configuration project with a legal context. We handle the configuration -- you own the legal interpretation.
The transformation
Before & after working with Celumai
"Our last regulatory inspection found no findings against our CRM data practices. The auditor specifically noted the quality of the consent audit trail. That did not happen by accident."
How we configured dual GDPR and GDPR/CCPA compliance for a company processing both EU and international personal data
A healthcare technology company processed personal data from EU and international users simultaneously. We designed a single CRM consent and retention configuration satisfying both GDPR and GDPR/CCPA 2023 without manual reconciliation between the two frameworks.
FAQ
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Everything you need to know about solving this problem.
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