Note: The data retention setting in the configuration hub is available to clients who have Ratings & Reviews or Questions & Answers, but not for clients with Product Ratings & Reviews (PRR).

With Bazaarvoice, you can make settings to purge personally identifiable information (PII) about your customers that is collected as part of your user-generated content (UGC). PII collected as part of UGC will remain in Bazaarvoice systems until client termination. By enabling automated purging of this data, you can respond more easily to data privacy regulations now and in future.

Note: This feature purges PII originating from customer transactions that are used to power emails and other UGC collection features. The setting does not affect PII collected in reviews or other types of UGC.

What is personally identifiable information?

PII provided to Bazaarvoice through BV Pixel and interaction feed transaction data includes the following information that can be used to identify a person:

  • User name

  • Email address

  • User ID

  • Locale

These data types are found in transaction data and are used in the following features:

  • Review requests (formerly post-interaction email or PIE)

  • Ask a Product Owner

  • Seller Ratings

How to customize the PII retention period

Note: Only specific users in a company are granted PII access (for example, users who work with Reports).
  1. Go to the configuration hub and select the Data Retention tab.
  2. Enable the setting for customizing the data retention period.
  3. Select the length of time PII is retained before being purged. You can select a time period of six, 12, or 24 months from the drop-down list. The time periods are based on an average 30-day month. Therefore, six months is equal to 180 days (which may differ slightly than the exact number of days in the six-month time period).

How does this affect other email settings?

Specific configuration parameters for emails are evaluated automatically before PII is purged to ensure there are no conflicts between the services.

Caution: Parameters listed in the following table should contain values equal to or lower than the value of the retention period (in days).
Example: If you enable data retention in the configuration hub and select a retention period of six months (180 days), then the email settings for review requests and Ask a Product Owner emails as shown in the following table must be less than or equal to 180 days for the data to be purged.

Email settings

Service UI navigation Field name
Review requests Configuration > Collect Reviews > Configure Messages > Settings > Review Request Days to wait before sending the first review request
Days to wait before sending the review request reminder (optional)
Delay between multiple review requests for the same product (in days)
Ask a Product Owner Days to wait before sending an email to a product owner

What happens once you’ve deleted data?

Once you have customized your PII retention period, the results are as follows:

  • Purged data cannot be retrieved.

  • If you use the Ask a Product Owner service, setting shorter retention periods limits the number of product owners who are available.

  • If you run historical review request, uploading transactions older than the retention period will mean those transactions will not trigger emails (and PII will be purged).

  • Data purging impacts troubleshooting emails that are older than the data retention period.