TL;DR:

• Hiding personal data on customer support platforms is important for privacy and data protection.
• It helps to minimize security concerns and reduce the chances of insider threats.
• Hiding personal data also minimizes the risk of mistakes and makes customers feel more comfortable.
• Support agents often don't need access to full personal information to assist customers.
• Having clear protocols for data access can demonstrate due diligence and limit liability.

Why hide Email, Phone Number, PII Data On Customer Support?

1. Privacy and Data Protection: With the rise of data privacy regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the U.S., and similar laws in other jurisdictions, companies are becoming more cautious about how they handle and share personal data. Companies reduce the risk of unintentional data breaches or misuse by hiding or redacting certain personal information.
2. Security Concerns: Restricting access to sensitive data helps to reduce the chances of insider threats. By limiting who can see personal data, businesses can better protect their customers and themselves from potential malicious activity or inadvertent data leaks.
3. Minimize Mistakes: Agents might mistakenly share or misuse personal data, even with the best of intentions. By not providing them with this information in the first place, the chances of such mistakes are significantly reduced.
4. Customer Comfort: Knowing that their personal data is not visible to every support agent can make customers feel more at ease when reaching out for assistance.
5. Functional Necessity: For many support inquiries, agents might not need access to a customer's full email address or phone number to assist them. If they require the data for verification or other purposes, systems can be designed to validate without revealing the complete information.
6. Uniform Experience: By focusing on the issue at hand and not on the customer's personal details, support agents can provide a more uniform experience, treating every inquiry with the same level of importance and objectivity.
7. Limited Liability: If there's ever a situation where the company is scrutinized for how personal data was used or managed, having clear protocols limiting data access can demonstrate due diligence.

However, it's also worth noting that there are scenarios where support agents might need to access such personal information, like when they're tasked with tasks that specifically require them. In such cases, it's crucial to have stringent data access protocols and regular training to ensure that agents handle the data responsibly and securely.

How to hide customer email, phone number, PII on Zendesk?

Strac (Data Loss Prevention) for Zendesk will automatically hide any sensitive data on Zendesk site. For example in the below screenshot, you can see that the original customer email has been replaced with UNKNOWN@EMAIL.COM.

How to hide customer email, phone number, PII on Intercom?

Strac (Data Loss Prevention) for Intercom will automatically hide any sensitive data on Intercom app. For example in the below screenshot, you can see that the customer emails have been replaced with dummy email addresses. Read below on all UX (User Experience) Strac provides to hide sensitive data

‎Different UX (User Experience) to hide sensitive data

There are different user experiences that the Strac customer can configure:

1. Redact: In this mode, Strac will blacken out the sensitive data (e.g. customer email or any sensitive data)
2. Format-Preserving Pseudonyms: These are artificial labels generated from confidential data but maintain the same structure and size as the original input. To illustrate, consider the bank account number "1234-5678-9012" being transformed to "5678-1234-9012".
3. Masking: This method hides specific sections of data, substituting them with symbols like * or X. For instance, a phone number "123-456-7890" might be displayed as "123--" or "1-4-7".

SaaS Apps where you can hide customer data

The above experience is rolled out for all other SaaS apps which deal with customer data

AirCall

Salesforce

Kustomer

Customer.io

Shopify

Quickbooks

Front

HubSpot

Microsoft Dynamics 365

Close

Zoho

FreshDesk

Service Now

Sugar CRM

Nimble