Customer Services

How information is processed when you use our my.northdevon.gov.uk service or speak to our customer services advisors over the phone or in person.

Purpose and lawful basis for processing

There are a variety of ways in which you can contact us to make an enquiry or request a service from the Council including:

  • Via our online customer services application, my.northdevon.gov.uk
  • Over the telephone with our customer services advisors
  • In person with our customer services advisors

Where you make an enquiry or request a service then we collect information, including your personal data, so that we can respond to you and fulfil our legal obligations and public functions as a district council.

The lawful bases we rely on to process your personal data are:

  • Article 6(1)(c) of the GDPR, which allows us to process personal data when this is necessary to comply with a legal obligation
  • Article 6(1)(e) of the GDPR which allows us to process personal data when this is necessary to perform our public tasks as a district council

If the information you provide us in relation to your enquiry contains special category data, such as health, religious or ethnic information, the lawful basis we rely on to process it is article 9(2)(g) of the GDPR, which also relates to our public task and our legal obligations.  In addition to this we also rely on Schedule 1 Part 2(6) of the Data Protection Act 2018 which relates to statutory and government purposes.

What we need

We need enough information from you to answer your enquiry or process your request.  If we do not need to collect your personal data to respond to your enquiry or request then we will not do so.

When you access our my.northdevon.gov.uk application then you will need to set up an account which will include needing to supply an email address.  You will then be asked to complete a profile which requires your name, address and contact details.  Only your name and email address are required to use the customer services application but your address details may be required on certain forms to allow you to submit them.  Certain forms also require the provision of additional personal data (for instance financial data if you are making a payment) and, sometimes, special category data (eg. health data or information on criminal convictions) depending on the form that you are submitting - further information as to the reason this information is needed is provided on the relevant form.

When you telephone our customer services advisors, or attend our offices and speak to our customer services advisors in person, then they will normally need to take your name, address and telephone number (and may request other contact details such as your email address) to allow them to process your request or to refer your request on to be actioned by the relevant department and a response provided to you.  Where relevant to your request it may be necessary to take additional information from you, such as information about your age, financial information (eg. if you are making a payment) or information about your health, the reason for the collection of this information will be explained to you as relevant to the purpose of your call or visit to our offices.

What we do with it

Whether you use our online my.northdevon.gov.uk application or contact our customer services advisors by telephone or in person, we will record your enquiry or request on our customer relationship management software.  We do this in order to ensure that we can get your enquiry or request to the correct team within the Council to be dealt with.  The information you provide is passed to the relevant team (or teams) within the Council to process your request and/or respond to you as appropriate to the enquiry or request that you have made.

Our customer relationship management software is supplied by a company called Granicus-Firmstep Ltd on cloud based software.  This means that the data we collect are stored on secure servers (compliant with British and International Standards) in the UK and the European Economic Area and are accessed by the Council over a secure network.  The Council has a data processing agreement with Granicus-Firmstep Ltd to ensure that any personal data they hold is held securely, not further processed without the Council's instruction and is retained/disposed of in accordance with the Council's instructions.

Where it is necessary to comply with the law or the Council’s public tasks, the information you have provided will be shared with various services within the Council. In this regard the contact details you supply and are recorded on our customer relationship management software will be shared, on request, with our Electoral Services team.  The basis for this is that:

  • The Representation of the People Act 1983 requires the electoral registration officer (ERO) to have an up to date electoral register and section 9A requires the ERO to take “all necessary steps to comply with the duty to maintain the electoral register and to ensure, as far as is reasonably practicable, that all those eligible – and no others – are registered in it”
  • Regulation 35 of the Representation of the People (England and Wales) Regulations 2001 provides that the ERO is able to inspect records kept (in whatever form) for the purpose of fulfilling the above “registration duties”.  These records include the Council's customer relationship management software
  • As provided by the legislation, this information will be used by the ERO to contact individuals regarding registering to vote

How long we keep it

For information about how long we hold personal data, see our Retention Schedule.

What are your rights?
We are acting in our official capacity to respond to your enquiry or your request, so you have the right to object to our processing of your personal data. There are legitimate reasons why we may refuse your objection, which depend on why we are processing it. For more information on your rights see Your Rights.