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Customers

What is a Customer?

A customer in the Point of Sale is the actual person or entity making the sale. It is who you are actually transacting with.

The POS also has accounts, which contain one or more customers.

So, when dealing with "Acme Co Ltd" (an account), you may actually sell to "Fred" (a customer) and "Mary" (another customer), even though they both are buying for "Acme Co Ltd". This seperation is required for complex environments, but is very easy to use in any retail environment.

Portal

Customer & Account Portals

Provide private information to your customers, receipts, statements, offers, orders...

Customer Specific Pricing

Loyalty Management

Loyalty

Reward your customers with special vouchers or free merchandise once they have earned sufficient points.

Prepay

Store cards that contain value. Used for Stored Value Cards, in house gift cards and similar

Online and Email Receipts

Receipts can be emailed, or provided online anonymously


Database Attributes and Fields

The following fields are available in the database for customers. This is subject to specific site setup. Site specific fields may also be available, which are not shown below. If the list below does not include a required attribute and it is common across an industry segment we may be able to add it

This table is only showing primary attributes stored in the database. Derived information such as number of sales, total revenue, last sale information, buying preferences and so forth are available via specific APIs. Many retailers extend this information to include

Related Information (aka relationships):

Accounts
A charge account that 1 or more customers belong too.
Customers_Person
Details of a related person that is not strictly a direct customer. Typically holds details of individual family members
Sales
Individual sales made by this customer
Rewards
Detail of progress and rewards on loyalty schemes
Prepay
Prepay (stored value) cards this customer may have purchased or used

The following fields exist but have yet to be documented.

Age and Size Fields
Sex, date of birth (full and partial), height, weight, shoe size, bra size
Name Fields
Title, preferred salutation
Family and Household fields
Number of adults and children. demographic references, Parent/caregiver id
Interests
Subjects/Areas interesting to customer
Food Preferences
Gluten free, coelic, low fat, vegan, etc
Interaction Fields
Acceptable communication reasons (monthly mailer, specials, etc). Shops/Locations of interest

Technical Notes

This section provides a quick list of technical notes and summaries for IT professionals.

Names

Capture of customer names has a few options due to the infinite variety of peoples names. Some sites prefer to capture the full name in a single field, others prefer to capture individual name parts into seperate database fields. There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.

The POS has to support both environments, so we expose multiple name fields, often containing redundant information

The following is a subset of the special cases you may need to deal with

Addresses

As with names, should addresses be captured as one block or seperate parts? The POS supports both models, but unless you have special handling requirements we suggest you use a single field mode for capture. This is more natural to enter and saves keystrokes.

Often, if you enter a single field address, the system will automatically try and decode to seperate lines for you

New Customer Creation

In the POS new customers can be created anywhere in your retail network. The system will take care of distribution to other lanes

You can load customers from external systems only and disable all POS create/update access to customer details.

If you are installing a Pos System in an environment where full access to customer lists should be restricted, such as an agency in a third party store, you should ensure that the Pos is configured to both limit and audit all customer searching.

Derived Customers

The POS system also has a concept of derived customers you will see on some reports. A derived customer is where the reporting system is able to use traces of information to tie random sales together in one purchasing group. This can be extremely useful for analytical reporting, however it can be misled.

Deriving customers can over time build a highly accurate picture of invidividuals. However, the engine deriving customers has been restricted to remove uniquely identifying information. Using the anonymous data for reporting is typically acceptable but going one step further may be too far.

Data Capture

You are freely able to capture and store almost any attribute about a customer (exception, full credit card numbers). These can be stored in global defined fields or site specific fields.

Many countries have regulations around customer data and we expect tighter controls in the future. In general, you should only capture and store data against a customer that you have a need to know. The rules are often less restrictive where data is being collected for anonymous purposes