Deleting Data

This only applies to customers who have Identity Resolution (IR) enabled. If you do not have identity resolution enabled, please refer to this article on deleting data.

Overview

You would normally delete by using Ids of Accounts and Contacts. But with Identity resolution, you could have multiple systems feeding data to create your Customer 360 leading to Lattice storing multiple account and contact Ids for a single account or contact.

Hence with IR, it is not sufficient to provide the ID, but it is important to tell us which System the ID belongs to.

In addition, you can now also have additional events being added to your data . These include:

• Web Visit Events
• Marketing Activities
• Account Intent
• Opportunity

The delete option now allows you to delete your data 

• Accounts
• Contacts
• Transactions
• Web Visit Events
• Marketing Activities
• Account Intent
• Opportunity

How do I delete my data?

There are two ways to delete your data

1. Manually Delete data directly using the product UI - This works best in scenarios where you want to perform ad-hoc deletion of data e.g. you make a mistake and would like to remove incorrect data

2. Automate deletion of data - Applicable when your data is constantly updated and may result in stale data needing to be removed. This allows you to automate the process without having to have someone login to the product and manually trigger a delete

Manually Deleting data 

You should be an administrator to delete the data. As an admin, you will see an option to delete from the My Data page.

Follow these steps to delete your data

Step1: Select the type of data you would like to delete

Step2: Select the information available to delete your data

Depending on what you selected in Step1, you will have an option to individually delete accounts and contacts, delete events based on a date range or delete all of your data for any type of data.

If you select the option to delete individual records, the platform will require you to provide Ids of the records you are trying to delete Account Id if you are deleting accounts and Contact Id if you are deleting contacts. 

It is possible some accounts and contacts are created from event data and you may not have an ID to use. In these cases, you should use the Lattice ID. Lattice ID is a unique Id generated by the platform for all accounts and contacts. 

If you want to Delete All, you will need to ensure that the new data is imported within the same PA (Process and Analysis) job that the delete job is included in. To do this you can either load the new data before clicking Delete All or load the new data immediately after you click Delete All. 

Step3 : Select between Hard and Soft delete

Lattice supports two types of delete: Hard Delete and Soft Delete

Hard Delete: If you delete an account, the account, contact and all events associated with these accounts and contacts will be permanently deleted. The system will internally do a rematch of your entire dataset to ensure these objects are not automatically created again. This is a slow process and can take several hours to complete. Please make sure you are selecting this option only when you want to permanently delete all the objects and you are okay with the PA (Process and Analysis) job taking longer to make the changes permanent.

Soft Delete: This option deletes the requested object but does not delete the child and event data. For e.g. if you delete an account, only the account is deleted but the contact and all the events are still stored in the platform. If the account that was deleted was ever loaded to the platform in the future, all the contacts and the events will become automatically visible and usable.  This type of delete is much quicker. If your purpose is to remove an account or contact from being used during segmentation, export etc. you should use this option.

Automate Delete (Beta)

The above options for delete are quite comprehensive, but requires you to actively use the product to perform the delete action. 

You may have situations where you need to delete some accounts or contacts on a regular basis. This is fairly common as data is cleaned or removed on a regular basis from your source system. When that happens you want data in Lattice to reflect these changes.

You can now automate this process without having to manually provide a list of records to delete from the UI.

This is still a beta feature and not available to everyone. If you would like to try this out, please reach out to your customer success manager who can answer any questions and if it makes sense activate this for you to try out.

Here is what you have to do to automate the delete process

Step1: Send a snapshot of the UI configuration to support to setup a delete

Go to the delete UI and pick how you would like to delete data

• What do you want to delete (Accounts, Contacts, Event data )
• What inputs are you going to provide to delete the data 
  • Are you going to be provide IDs? Are these Lattice Ids or IDs from your system. If you are using IDs from your system, provide the System name.
  • Do you want to delete time series data for a specific range. You need to provide start and end date. If you dont provide the dates then all the event data will be deleted. If you only provide a start date all data from that date will be deleted.
• Would you like to do a Hard or a Soft delete.

You can either send a screen shot of the UI with all the things configured or provide the above information to support.

Step2: Support creates a dedicated S3 folder to accept data to fit your configuration

Step3: Provide the CSV with the ID column 

The file format will be the same as what you would provide in the UI.

Step 4: PA (Process and Analysis) job processes the delete request

The next PA job will automatically pick up the delete file and delete the records from your system. This experience should be the same as if you had initiated the delete process from the UI, but without the limitations.

Can I modify the configuration associated with the delete S3 folder?

Yes, please log a support ticket to make changes to your configuration. Note once you make these changes, any future delete files will use that configuration.

Can I have multiple configurations?

Each folder is tied to a specific configuration. If you need a different configuration, you will have to have a separate S3 folder

Here are some reasons to need multiple configurations: 

• Setup one configuration per data type you would like to delete.
• Setup different configuration when you want to use IDs from different system

The process to request new configurations is the same as creating your first configuration. Follow steps 1-4 and that will create a new configuration.