Unifying customer data and complying with the Australian Privacy Act

It’s pretty easy to make the case for unifying your customer data. It brings all the information from your sales, marketing, and customer support systems together so teams are working from a single source of truth. The benefits of that compound regularly, and a centralised platform, like a customer relationship management system (CRM), is one of the most popular ways to realise them.

According to our 2026 State of Sales report, 84% of sales teams without an all-in-one platform are planning to consolidate their technology, so the move towards data unification is already well underway. As Australian businesses look forward to the benefits of data unification, they also need to ensure they comply with strict privacy and data security laws.

That’s why we’ve developed this guide. We’ll explain the main benefits of consolidating your customer data, cover the laws you need to consider when doing so, and give you a three-stage framework to help you establish a compliant solution.

• Fragmented customer data can affect both your customers’ experience and your teams’ ability to make sound, timely decisions, but unifying it without planning how it will be used can impact your compliance with Australian privacy laws
• The Australian Privacy Act doesn’t necessarily conflict with the concept of data unification; it just provides guardrails to ensure that you’re using information responsibly
• You can unify data and maintain compliance by following a three-stage process
• Salesforce has extensive experience with compliant, enterprise-grade data unification projects

• The hidden costs of fragmented customer data
• The Australian Privacy Act: It’s all about reasonable expectations
• Unifying customer data: A framework to keep you compliant
• Compliant data unification in the real world
• Achieve two goals at once
• FAQs

According to our latest State of Data and Analytics report, 70% of data and analytics leaders believe that unstructured data is preventing them from gaining the most valuable insights about their organisation, while 87% say that having unified data will allow them to better meet customers’ expectations.

Business leaders use customer data to drive everything from marketing budgets to investment in new products. If that data is coming from several disconnected systems, it can be contradictory, incomplete, or both. Any decisions based on that information will likely be equally flawed.

Fragmented data also has a direct and meaningful impact on how customers view your business. For example, if a customer receives one message from a sales representative and another from customer support, they may get the impression that the business is disorganised. If, however, all teams are working with the same information, those situations are less likely to occur.

An overly complex tech stack can also affect efficiency. Our research has shown that sellers use an average of eight tools to close deals , and they spend 60% of their time on non-selling tasks, like entering data manually across those tools. Having a unified solution not only reduces time spent on separate systems, but it also allows teams to automate more tasks and use agentic AI. That’s because reliable AI depends on accurate information.

The Privacy Act 1988, more commonly known as the Australian Privacy Act, is the primary piece of legislation relating to data privacy in Australia. It’s administered by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) .

Before we dive into how the Australian Privacy Act impacts data unification, it’s worth explaining some of its provisions. In most cases, the law applies to businesses with an annual turnover of more than $3 million , meaning that most small businesses are exempt. However, some smaller companies do need to comply, including health services providers, credit reporting bodies, and businesses that buy, sell, or share personal information without the individual’s consent.

The Act contains 13 Australian Privacy Principles (APPs), sometimes shortened to just ‘privacy principles’. They’re the specific rules that govern how personal information can be collected, used, stored, and shared.

When discussing data unification, six specific APPs are especially relevant. We’ll explain each below:

It’s also worth noting that any business dealing with credit reporting or health information must comply with stricter consumer rights obligations, both within the Australian Privacy Act and as part of separate state and federal legislation (like Victoria's Health Records Act ).

The key takeaway in terms of data unification is that you need to understand what information you’re collecting, why you’re collecting it, what you’re using it for, and whether you’ll introduce any new uses after consolidation. This isn’t a reason to avoid data unification; it just means you need to be well organised and have a plan in place. That’s what we’ll cover next.

The Australian Privacy Act applies to all customer data that you’re collecting and storing, whether it exists across multiple platforms or as part of a unified system. Data consolidation projects can run into difficulties when they introduce new uses for the information that a customer might not reasonably expect.

To avoid this, your project should follow three main rules: understand how you currently collect and use data, choose a solution that allows you to manage that data in a compliant manner, and ensure your system is properly managed going forward.

It’s difficult to ensure you aren’t misusing customer data if you don’t know what you’re actually collecting. As a first step, you should reconcile what customer information your sales, marketing, and customer service teams are holding and what the primary purpose of that data is.

For example, your sales team might store contact details for each customer, along with information about their purchase history. Your customer service team may maintain the same contact details, as well as records of previous support requests. Under the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs), this information is reasonable for each team to perform its job, as long as the customer knows it’s being collected.

When considering a data unification project, you should ask whether the sales team needs access to information about previous support requests or whether the customer service desk needs to know about what each customer has been buying.

Under APP 6.2, secondary use of information is acceptable, as long as it’s related to the primary purpose and the customer would reasonably expect it. In this example, the information being shared is closely related to how each team performs its duties, and it’s also reasonable to assume that the information would be shared.

On the other hand, you might plan to give your accounting department access to customer information to inform decisions about extending credit. This would most likely go beyond what a customer would expect, unless you had expressly notified them of that purpose under APP 5.

Purpose and access are key here: Why was the information collected, how is it being used, and who needs to see it? This doesn’t negate the idea of data unification; it just informs how your system will be set up. That’s where selecting the right platform can play a major role, which we’ll explain next.

It’s important to note that there are several ways to unify data, including using all-in-one customer relationship management (CRM) systems, customer data platforms (CDPs), or data warehouses, or syncing data across existing applications using integration software.

Regardless of the model, the same simple questions apply when you’re identifying how data will be collected, stored, and managed:

Many of the questions above look to the future. That’s because compliance with the Australian Privacy Act is an ongoing process. Having the right system in place to support your data management policy can save a lot of headaches and potential problems in the long run.

First, your privacy plan is the foundation of everything that follows. It should include how you’ll handle things like data de-identification, data retention, consent tracking, and the Right to Be Forgotten (RTBF). Our Privacy Centre offers more in-depth resources on the creation and management of privacy policies.

Under APP 5, ongoing consent is an especially important consideration. Every business evolves, and so too will the data you’re collecting and how you’ll use it. In itself, that’s not an issue, as long as your privacy policy and customer notifications also reflect those updates. More advanced CRMs feature built-in consent management tools designed to streamline this process.

A unified system should also allow you to update customer preferences across all systems. For example, if a customer wants all their data deleted or they don’t want their information used in reports, the more advanced CRMs enable this from a central dashboard.

In terms of data access, your consolidated solution should allow you to monitor and update exactly who can view customer information. This applies not only to team members, but also to any AI-based agents and automated reporting functions.

Finally, under the Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) scheme, you’re required to inform both affected individuals and the OAIC of any breaches that could cause serious harm. The most effective data unification systems allow you to identify such risks before they occur while also making it much easier to identify who has been affected if a breach does happen.

Salesforce’s enterprise-grade CRM and CDP solutions offer end-to-end privacy compliance, including de-identifying sensitive data, deleting excess data, simplifying customer requests, and managing customer consent.

Our CRM solution is underpinned by Agentforce, our agentic AI system. This enables continuous compliance oversight, including ongoing scans of your organisation's data and policies against Australian regulations. The platform also allows you to manage sensitive data, automate data subject access requests (DSARs), and handle Right to Be Forgotten (RTBF) requests.

Data 360 is at the heart of our Customer Data Management system (CDM), allowing for a more efficient unification of fragmented data without the need to implement an entirely new platform. Governance is a core element of Data 360, allowing you to develop and implement data management policies across all users and business units.

Latitude Financial Services, a sales finance and consumer lending business, needed to unify its data and remain compliant with Australian laws. Salesforce developed a solution that combined Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Data 360 and allowed Latitude’s teams to see all customers and the products they use in one place.

More importantly, the project established secure, rules-based processes for data handling and a single framework for managing customer consent. With the assistance of Salesforce’s Professional Services team, the project was completed in under five months.

While unifying your customer data and complying with the Australian Privacy Act might sound like competing goals, they’re actually complementary. By connecting all your information, you’ll have greater oversight of what data you’re collecting, how you’re using it, and who has access. All of those tasks are more difficult when your data is fragmented across multiple platforms.

The same principle applies to agentic AI. When properly implemented as part of a well-defined privacy policy, AI can be a powerful tool that improves your compliance, rather than hindering it.

The keys to unifying data safely and effectively are careful planning and execution, which is where Salesforce shines. We have extensive experience managing complex data unification projects across finance, healthcare, and other high-risk sectors where data management is critical to success. If you’d like to learn how we can move your data unification project forward, contact our expert advisors for a chat.