Erasing a Contact
Permanently delete a person and their data to satisfy a right-to-erasure request
When someone asks you to delete everything you hold about them, erasing the contact does it: the person and the data attached to them are destroyed, not hidden.
This is not the same as removing a contact from a list, and it is not the same as a merge. It cannot be undone.
Erasure is irreversible. There is no undo, no restore, and no support request that can bring the data back. Use merging for duplicates and ordinary deletion for tidying up - erasure is for legal deletion requests only.
Who Can Do It
| Requirement | |
|---|---|
| Role | Owner, Admin or Editor. Agents cannot erase. |
| Scope | The contact must be in your own organisation. You cannot erase another organisation's contacts. |
Unlike merging and splitting, erasure is not restricted by plan - a data-deletion obligation does not depend on what you pay.
Preview First
Erasure is a two-step action, and the first step changes nothing.
The preview is a dry run. It reports:
- What would be destroyed, counted per kind of record - messages, conversations, field values, and so on.
- Warnings - anything you should know before going ahead.
Read the counts. This is where you notice that you picked the wrong row, or that a merged contact carries far more history than you expected - a merged person holds everything from every identity folded into them, and erasing it erases all of it.
Then Confirm
Only after the preview can you confirm the erasure. Wexio asks for a deliberate confirmation rather than a single click, because there is no way back.
When it completes you get:
| When it happened | The exact time of erasure. |
| What was destroyed | The real counts, which you can compare against the preview. |
| An erasure record | Your proof that the request was fulfilled. |
Keep the erasure record reference with your own ticket. It is what lets you answer "prove you deleted it" months later, once the data itself is gone.
You can also note a reason when erasing - put your ticket or request number there, so the erasure record points back to why it happened.
What Erasure Does Not Cover
| Other organisations | If the same person contacted a different organisation, that is their data and their obligation. Erasure is scoped to yours. |
| Your own copies | If you mirror contacts into a CRM or your own backend, erase them there too. Wexio deletes its own records, not yours. |
| Exports already taken | A CSV someone downloaded last month is outside Wexio. |
If you run an integration that mirrors contacts, handle erasure on both sides. Wexio erasing its copy does not reach into your systems.
Erasing from Your Own Code
Data-deletion requests often arrive through your own product rather than the Wexio dashboard, so erasure is available over the API too - with a dedicated, separately granted permission so a routine contact-sync integration cannot destroy data.
See Contacts → Erasure for the preview and erase operations and a safe sequence to call them in.
Related
- Merging contacts - for duplicates, and reversible
- Splitting contacts - undoing a merge
- People - the contact list