Wessex Lifts have been in the business of innovating, designing, manufacturing, installing and maintaining our own home lifts, platform lifts and various other pieces of accessibility equipment including (but not limited to) stairlifts, hoists, door openers and bathing equipment.
From time to time we need to collect personal information about our customers. Here is a guide to exactly what we may keep on record.
If you have any questions about this, please Contact Us and we can talk you through things in more detail.
Data we collect and store falls into two main categories; data we collect ourselves and data we get shared with us. Because Wessex work so closely with councils, housing authorities and various other agencies including building firms, architects and other tradesmen, we are passed a lot of personal data by them. This should be something you look at in their Privacy Policies. If you are worried about this, we can find the right person from such an agency for you to speak to, so please get in Contact.
Data we get shared from a council, housing authority or other agency, including the following:
If we have installed a piece of accessibility equipment, we may collect details that are vital to the installation of the product, and are required to organise the installation for you.
If we have been contracted to maintain one of our products or another piece of accessibility equipment, we may collect data to be able to contact you and meet the contract requirements.
If an Occupational Therapist or anyone representing a council, housing association or other agency approaches us, we may use the data they provide us with to contact you to arrange a visit.
Data we collect ourselves comes from the following places:
If you have made an enquiry for a site survey to be conducted by one of our Sales Managers, we will collect data over the phone from you in order to process your enquiry.
If you have visited our website, information collected by Cookies gets collected, which you were notified about via a popup notification. Please read our Cookie Policy for more information about this.
If you have logged into our Extranet, the company that host that FTP site keep login details. Find their policies here; https://www.smartfile.com/policy/
If you call us, we mention at the start of the call that 'Calls may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes.' We will (as it protects our Legitimate Interests) collect this data, but if you want it removed we will delete it.
If you attend a conference or show and you offer us your business card, we take that as permission to contact you once to check you are still interested in our product.
We do not collect data without a good reason, and as such we mainly use data to provide our services. Getting in contact with our customers is an important part of our business, and we often capture the following data;
Name: This is used to identify our customers in our records.
Telephone Number: We need this information if you have a service contract with us or if you have had the lift installed by us, as we may need to contact you from time to time to book services or get in contact.
Email Address: - Same as Telephone Number
Postal Address: If a lift has been installed in your property, or if you have a maintenance contract with us, we retain this data to pass the engineer in case you want us to make a visit.
Wherever possible, we endeavour to not share your data. However, there are certain situations where, in order to provide you with the absolute best service, we have to share your data with companies. These are approved, Wessex Trained, partners and are usually also a part of our Wessex Dealer Network. We will only give data to Wessex partner organisations if it is imperative to provide the service you need, or if you have asked us to.
Get in Contact if you want to find out more about our partners.
We only keep your personal data for as long as we need to. Under BS5900:2012, it is recommended that through-floor lifts receive regular maintenance. As such, we generally keep your data from either the point your lift is installed, or from the point we've started looking after your accessibility equipment, to the point that it is removed or we find out it is gone.
However, we may also retain your data on the basis of our Legitimate Interests. This data can be extremely important to our business, for a number of reasons including accounting/financial purposes and to, in some situations, protect our employees.
That being said, there are types of data we can simply get rid of. If you want us to know exactly what these are, please get in Contact. We can remove data in the following ways;
If your product is part of a council, housing authority or another agencies maintenance contract with us, you will need to contact them about us using your personal data. Please get in Contact with us so we can help you find the right people to speak to within that organisation.
If you have a private contract set up with us, we will keep your data for the length of the contract. If you want us to destroy your personal data after that, get in Contact, so we can discuss this further.
Pieces of mobility/accessibility equipment are not only used by adults but children as well. Therefore it is sometimes necessary for us to keep basic children's data on file.
Children over the age of 13 are allowed to submit their own data, but children under 13 years of age will need the consent of a parent or guardian before we keep or store their data.
With regards to children under 13, we endeavour to only collect basic personal information about children if it is absolutely necessary. This basic information extends to names of the users of accessibility equipment we look after or have sold/installed. Any addresses, telephone numbers or email addresses associated with these children are almost always registered to the legal guardians of those children, or are at the location of the product.
We reserve the right to make changes to this Privacy Policy from time to time.
If you are a private customer, we will usually avoid clogging up your inbox and simply post a popup for a few months on our website.
If you are a customer through a council, housing authority or another agency, we may not contact you directly with updates to this policy, as these are the terms laid out between your council/authority and us. If you have questions about this, get in Contact.
We collect Cookies. Cookies are small files that a site or its service providers tansfer to your computer's hard drive through your web browser (if you allow it to do so). They enable the sites (or service providers) systems to recognise your browser and capture and remember certain information.
We have tried to be very dilligent with our Cookie Policy and how we handle Cookies. We have a clear pop-up banner that appears at the bottom of the page when you first visit our website. This lets you accept all Cookies or decline all but the essential ones (one, actually).
Even when you have selected 'decline', you may still see some of the cookies (in the table below), marked, 'non-essential'. This is most likely on Google Chrome. However, these Cookies have been overwritten and you are not being tracked. You can check this for youself, if you know what you're doing.
There are a few cookies we collect, including the following:
Cookie Name | Name | Explanation |
---|---|---|
cookie-consent | Cookie Consent Popup | Essential; a popup which remembers if you clicked to 'accept cookies', so it won't pop up every time you view the site. |
_ga | Google Analytics | Non-essential; used to distinguish users. |
_gat | Google Analytics | Non-essential; used to throttle request rates. |
_gid | Google Analytics | Non-essential; registers a unique ID that is used to generate statistical data about the device and behaviour. |
_ga_S54VCWM19T | Google Analytics | Non-essential; used to persist session state. |
If you aren't happy with us using Cookies, the best solution is to disable them in your web browser. There's a helpful guide on how to do so: http://www.wikihow.com/Disable-Cookies
We have tried to design our online services so disabling Cookies has as little impact as possible. We are currently aware of only 1 service that requires Cookies to be enabled, and that is our Extranet. If you need something from our Extranet and do not want to enable Cookies, just Contact us and we'll try and get the right files to you.
If we start using new Cookies that you should know about, we will update this table, and post a notice to our website to notify you.
In short, we collect cookies to provide you with a better user experience on our website and whilst using our services online. This usually involved collecting aggregate data about your visit.