Privacy Policy

We understand that privacy and the security of your personal information is extremely important. Because of that, this policy sets out what we do with your information and what we do to keep it secure. It also explains where and how we collect your personal information, as well as your rights over any personal information we hold about you.

This policy applies to you if you use our products or services in store, over the phone, online, or interacting with us on social media. This policy gives effect to our commitment to protect your personal information.

We hold your personal information [name, address, email address and date of birth] to identify you to process your order, identify you as a customer to process your order, facilitate any service and/or guarantee requirements and, where consent to marketing has been provided, selectively target marketing messages in accordance with preferences set and to improve the relevance of advertising and communications. Further details about exactly how your data is used and shared is provided below.

What information do we hold

• Information that you provide to us such as your name, address, date of birth, telephone number, email address, bank account and payment card details and any feedback you give to us, including by phone, email, post, or when you communicate with us via social media
• Information about the services that we provide to you (including for example, the things we have provided to you, when and where, what you paid, the way you use our products and Services, and so on);
• Information you provide to apply for products and financial services offered by Sofology Ltd and its partners. We will take into account other information about you such as your employment details, financial position, information taken from identification documents, and details of cardholders;
• Your account login details, including your user name and chosen password;
• Your contact details and details of the emails and other electronic communications you receive from us, including whether that communication has been opened and if you have clicked on any links within that communication. We want to make sure that our communications are useful for you, so if you don't open them or don't click on any links in them, we know we need to improve our Services.

What we do with the information we gather

We require this information to understand your needs and provide you with a better service, and in particular for the following reasons:

• Finance providers namely Laser or V12 Retail Finance for the purposes of credit fulfilment
• Other third party service providers to help us respond to customer service or technical issues.
• Find ways to improve our Services, stores apps and website by asking customer and user surveys sent via email and/or SMS;
• Where explicit consent has been provided, we may periodically send promotional emails or SMS about relevant products, special offers or other information which we think you may find interesting using the email address and/or mobile phone number which you have provided via trusted partners; Process your orders and payments;
• Personalise your shopping experience, for example by understanding your location or how you use our apps and websites to provide you with personalised offers or shopping ideas;
• Help us ensure that our customers are genuine and to prevent fraud. Where there is a legitimate suspicion of fraudulent activity, the information you provide will be used to verify that customers are genuine and to prevent fraud and the data hold will be checked against fraudulent databases with our Financial Providers (named above);
• For statistical analysis to understand our customer behaviour and to provide our customers with a better, more personalised service. The processes undertaken will never negatively impact a Customer. This may include sharing information about you, collected as part of a purchase, with any of our Group Companies including DFS and Dwell. Sofology use selected third parties to do this. Where your personal information is disclosed to any of our service providers for these purposes, they will only have access to the information needed to perform the functions, and our contractual agreements with them do not permit them to use your personal information for their own purposes.;
• Help us understand more about you as a customer, the products and services you consume, the manner in which you consume them;
• Provide for the safety and security of our colleagues and customers; and
• Help answer your questions and solve any issues you have.
• We may use your phone number as part of the ordering process where customers are contacted shortly after placing an order to verify order accuracy, book your delivery (when appropriate), and, where necessary, inform you of delays, make payments and introduce relevant products and services. Contact you after visiting our stores or website in regards to your genuine interest in the products and services we offer.

Here at Sofology, we think it's important that our customers get to choose exactly what communications they receive and how they like to hear from us. That’s why we’ve put everything you need to know about the information we hold in one place. We have detailed below exactly what systems we use to process your data and the reason why each of these systems has been put in place. You can view and/or make any changes to your marketing preferences at any time by visiting here.

Customers with a MySofology account can also access their preferences via their account.

Our service providers

We work with lenders so they can process your personal information on our behalf... but only where they meet our standards on the processing of data and security. We only share information that allows them to provide their services to us or to facilitate them providing their services to you.

Customer Data

We use a web-based platform to hold our customer information and keep customers informed about important updates regarding their order(s) by email, text message, post and personalised messages in their MySofology account.

If you have placed an order with Sofology, we have a duty to keep you up to date with your order. As such, regardless of whether or not you have provided consent, you will be sent these important updates about your order and we will contact you in relation to this by post, email, SMS and/or by telephone.

If you have placed an order with Sofology and have also provided consent to receive marketing communications, you could be contacted by Sofology across email, SMS, telephone and/or post. You can choose what information you would like to receive from Sofology by controlling your preferences by visiting here:

https://www.sofology.co.uk/pre-preference-centre.

If you have not placed an order with Sofology but have registered for a MySofology account and provided either your email address or have logged on using Facebook, and have indicated an interest in placing an order, by either selecting ranges and adding them to 'Favourites' and/or have placed an item in the shopping basket (both on the website and in one of our Sofology stores) we will use the information you have provided to contact you in relation to completing that purchase. We use this information to let you know about things we think you will be interested in, to help you make the right decision when shopping for a new sofa, and to let you know about special offers and promotions.

Google

Google provides Sofology with the ability to track customer behaviour on both the website and what customers do on iPads when in store with the Sofologist. This monitoring allows Sofology to understand key business processes and metrics e.g. how many people have visited the website. This information is analysed to allow Sofology to further understand how the business operates. If a customer has provided appropriate consent, they will also receive marketing communications by Google e.g. targeted advertising. Preferences can be updated at any time in their Google settings. Customers can also opt-out of Google Analytics by using this Google tool.

Meta

Sofology works with Meta to serve personalised adverts to people who use Meta. If you do not want to see those adverts, you can choose not to see these by updating your advertising preferences within Facebook.

EssenceMediacom

Sofology works with this digital agency to help facilitate their marketing activity. This includes personalised adverts, sharing purchasing data to further understand our customers and making sure adverts we show to customers are relevant.

Hotjar

Hotjar is a platform that monitors what customers do online and provides valuable information about how the website is used. Individual customer journeys can be replayed, however, individual customers cannot be identified.

Contentsquare

We use Contentsquare on our website to help us understand the behaviour of our website visitors. ContentSquare aggregates usage and frequency data to help us identify where visitors struggle the most on our website to allow us to improve our user experience. The statistics created by Contentsquare are anonymous.

Syntelate

Sofology works with Syntelate to make phone calls to customers to:

1. Ensure orders are correct and valid;
2. To help customers complete their order;
3. To help customers book their delivery;
4. To provide important updates on their delivery
5. To introduce additional products and/or services when validating their order.

As part of our in-store service, we offer free WiFi to all our customers. To do this, we use a service provided by ‘Purple WiFi.’  We collect customer information to provide free WiFi as well as ensuring that access to the internet, in our stores, is safe and relevant to those who connect to it. Customers can also choose whether or not to be opted into receive marketing information at the point when they connected to the Free WiFi. If a customer wishes to change their marketing preferences, they can do so via the marketing preferences centre. Data collected by Purple WiFi is only used to provide the service and not for any marketing purposes.

Communications and processing for operational purposes:

To ensure the smooth running of Sofology, we rely on working with a number of specially selected partners. Customer data is only processed for the purposes described below and shared according to GDPR standards.

Trust Pilot

As part of our commitment to continually improving our customer service, we ask our customers to review our products. This is currently done by our partner, Trust Pilot, sending an email invitation. Customers can also review their product by writing a review here: https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/sofology.co.uk. Sofology only passes the information necessary to Trust Pilot in a completely secure method to ask customers to review their experience.

Survey Monkey

Here at Sofology, we are dedicated to getting important feedback from our customers at a number of different stages throughout the buying journey. This information is critical to understanding more about our customers and we rely upon this feedback to improve the journey for customers. We invite customers to complete a short survey via Survey Monkey by email invitation. Survey Monkey only receives the information necessary to complete this specific task and store the results of that survey.

Intercom

Intercom enables customers to ask questions to our Sofologists and/or access our extensive hub of knowledge. Customers can also raise service tickets for further assistance within this platform. As such, personal information is used to identify the customer and enable an online, email or telephone conversation between the Sofologist and the customer.

Zendesk

Zendesk provides Sofology with the ability to communicate and track customer requests. It keeps a log of conversations between our Sofologists and customers as well as enabling us to process important requests between different areas of our business e.g. booking a visit by a technician. Most of the information that we hold in Zendesk is critical for Sofology to process your order or support customer orders should you need further assistance after your item(s) have been delivered.

Sofology also uses Zendesk to make contact with Customers who have indicated they would like to purchase an item e.g. by adding an item or items to their basket or by adding products to 'My Favourites'. In these cases, customers may receive a phone call, text message or email from Sofologists to assist with their order.

Kapow

Text messages about delivery updates to Sofology customers are sent from a system called Kapow. Only information necessary to complete this action is sent to Kapow.

Sprinklr

Sprinklr is an online platform that enables Sofology to both recognise and communicate with customers across all social media channels. We use this information to carefully monitor queries and ensure that the correct Sofologist is able to respond in a timely manner.

How long do we keep your information for?

We will retain a record of your personal information. This is done in order to provide you with a high quality and consistent service across our group. We will always retain your personal information in accordance with law and regulation and never retain your information for longer than is necessary.

Keeping you informed about our products and services

We would like to tell you about the great offers, ideas, products and services of Sofology from time to time that we think might be relevant. Where you have consented to us doing so, we may do this through the post, by email, text message, telephone, online, using social media, push notifications via apps, or by any other electronic means.

We won't send you marketing messages if you tell us not to but we will still need to send you occasional service-related messages. If you wish to amend your marketing preferences, you can do so either logging into 'MySofology' and following the directions or by calling our Customer Service Team.

Security

We are committed to ensuring that your information is secure. In order to prevent unauthorised access or disclosure, we have put in place suitable physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect online.

Links to other websites

Our website may contain links to other websites of interest. However, once you have used these links to leave our site, you should note that we do not have any control over that other website. Therefore, we cannot be responsible for the protection and privacy of any information which you provide whilst visiting such sites and such sites are not governed by this privacy statement. You should exercise caution and look at the privacy statement applicable to the website in question.

How can customers request further information or a change to their details, otherwise known as SARS (Subject Matter Requests)?

You may choose to restrict the collection or use of your personal information in the following ways:

• Whenever you are asked to fill in a form on the website, look for the box that you can click to indicate that you do not want the information to be used by anybody for direct marketing purposes
• if you have previously agreed to us using your personal information for direct marketing purposes, you may change your mind at any time by writing to or emailing us at [email protected]

We will not sell, distribute or lease your personal information to third parties unless we have your permission or are required by law to do so. We may use your personal information to send you promotional information about third parties which we think you may find interesting if you tell us that you wish this to happen.

As part of GDPR, each customer now has the following rights:

• The right to be informed.
• The right of access.
• The right to rectification.
• The right to erasure.
• The right to restrict processing.
• The right to data portability.
• The right to object.
• Rights in relation to automated decision making and profiling.

If you would like to request any of these actions, please complete a request by either emailing [email protected] or by writing to:

Sofology,
Ashton Road,
Golborne,
WA3 3UL

If you believe that any information we are holding on you is incorrect or incomplete, please write to or email us as soon as possible, at the above address. We will promptly correct any information found to be incorrect.