What are the rules / best practices around adding disclaimer text to survey or email text?
I did some online searching for best practices around adding disclaimers to surveys, but I was underwhelmed by the available content on this topic. Are any of you experts in this area or can you point me to a resource that covers best practices for how business should use disclaimers in surveys? I'm familiar with rules used at universities around the protection of PII, and I'm aware of a lot of the GDPR rules. I'm just not savvy on how to set up disclaimer language or if it's required that I set up disclaimer language or consents for every survey that goes out to customers.
I know that most of the surveys I take from other businesses/websites/service don't precede the survey with a disclaimer. It is my assumption that if I have a login to a site and they give me a survey, then they will be tying my response back to my PII and use it internally.
What I don't know is this: If you send surveys to customers who have logins to your product already (and who have already been covered by the NDAs and purchase agreements connected with using your product that tell them that we will use their data to improve the product), then do I still need to let respondents know that their responses are not anonymous or that their PII won't be shared with people outside of those in the company tasked with improving customer experience? Are we legally required, by GDPR or some other rules out there, to let users know every time we are going to be tying their responses back to their PII internally?
Any thoughts on this would be welcome.
Disclaimer? Do you mean like the informed consent area?
I don't know if you are legally required to do it- check in with your legal team. But I would say it's always ethically better to inform them what information you collect, and what you do with it. I'd rather be covered than not! Below is a copy of what I say in some of my transaction surveys... At least for my org (which is a public org), I find that people want to give feedback so we can improve! They know we collect their info.
[quote] Thank you for agreeing to take our survey. Please read the following to learn more about this survey. <br><br>
Why you received this survey<br>
You are being asked to take this survey because you have recently gone through XXXXX with XXXXX.<br><br>
What the survey is about<br>
We are interested in learning more about how the processes went for you, and understand customer satisfaction with this process. <br><br>
What information is collected<br>
Most information collected is from the answers you select in the survey. Personal identifying information (e.g. Name, Email, etc.), which you have already reported to XXXX, is also collected. Personal information is collected in order to ensure we have feedback from different customer segments. <br><br>
How long the survey will take <br>
This survey has up to 7 questions, and should take less than 5 minutes to complete. You are free to return to the link provided via email at any time in order to finish the survey if you run out of time. Once you submit the survey, you are unable to edit your answers. <br><br>
If you have any questions about this survey, please contact XXXXXX. <br><br>
To begin the survey, please press "Next". [/quote]
I've only had a problem with people wanting to be anonymous once or twice in 4 years using this language. And I respectfully inform them that I appreciate their desires, and as I can not make it anonymous, I will happily opt them out of our surveys.
Enter your E-mail address. We'll send you an e-mail with instructions to reset your password.