Quick 30–120 minute checklist (do this first)
- Inventory the outputs that go to customers or public notes (emails, chat replies, CRM notes, automated messages). Mark anything that could contain PII and assign an owner (15–30 mins).
- Define a short PII list for your team: full name, email, phone, NI/NINO, payment details, date of birth, health or legal details. Put this in the process doc everyone can access (10 mins).
- Add input filtering and redaction rules at the workflow entry point: strip or replace PII tokens before passing text to the assistant (20–40 mins).
- Enforce context windows and RAG boundaries: restrict the assistant’s context to short, vetted summaries or redacted chunks, and keep the RAG corpus separate from live PII (20–30 mins).
- Convert free‑text replies into template-based responses with controlled placeholders and explicit fail-safe phrases for unknowns (20–40 mins).
Operational controls to add now
Start with simple, enforceable rules rather than fancy tooling. Add a pre-send filter that removes or replaces any detected PII tokens in assistant outputs; tools like HubSpot, Salesforce or a Zapier/Make step can run this check before an email or note is saved. If you use RAG, keep the retrieval corpus on a read-only, redacted dataset and never include source documents containing raw PII.
Require consent and subscription checks before any customer-facing message. For marketing sends use Marketo or Pardot subscription fields (or equivalent fields in your CRM) as a gating property; for one-off transactional replies, ensure the workflow verifies consent or transaction context before sending. When in doubt, the assistant should return a neutral template asking for confirmation rather than inserting personal details.
Use templates with fixed slots rather than free-form generation. Templates reduce risk because the assistant only fills approved placeholders (order number, case ID) and never injects raw contact fields. Where the assistant must compose, add a human-review gate for high-risk categories (financial, legal, health) or when the confidence score is low.
Test plan, logging and simple monitoring
Run a short validation cycle: pick 20 realistic cases (mix of routine and edge cases), simulate inputs that include PII edge cases, and confirm the assistant never emits raw PII in outputs or notes. Document the expected result for each case and have the owner sign off.
Add minimal logging: record (a) the input type (email/chat/template), (b) whether redaction fired, (c) if a human review was triggered, and (d) the final disposition. This can be a simple CRM property, a spreadsheet row, or an automated note in Salesforce/HubSpot. Create an alert for repeated redaction failures or human-review backlogs so someone can fix rules before mistakes reach customers.
Keep a short rollback and review step: if a data leak is suspected, pause the sending queue, snapshot the recent logs and notify the owner. Run weekly spot checks for the first month and assign an owner to update filters and templates.
If you want a practical hand to run the checklist and the test plan in a day, Optira can help set it up and hand it over to your team.