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How to stop so many customer duplicates?

My customer list is constantly bombarded with duplicate entries for almost EVERY customer, every time. Pretty much all of my customers make bookings via Appointments online, then pay with card when they arrive. Often, they pay with a different card than what they booked with, so in those cases I understand why the system is creating two different customers.

 

But for some reason I'm no longer receiving hardly any suggestions for duplicate customers. Even though their names are exactly the same, and even other info (like their email address) are exactly the same, the system isn't suggesting a merger.

 

This means I'd have to tediously scroll through all 1,000+ customer entries and eyeball every one for possible duplication. This is INCREDIBLY FRUSTRATING because the list doesn't load all at once, and always jumps back up to the top of the list every time I edit a customer's information.

 

I've downloaded the customer data as a csv file and considered "merging" the info that way. But that is hardly an easier solution. Plus, given my experience with uploaded modified csv files for inventory items, I'd be very wary about uploading modified customer data for fear of things becoming hopelessly screwed up.

 

Not having duplicates flagged would just be annoying if the only consequence was having inaccurate customer info because their data is spread across multiple entries. But in addition it could become unnecessarily expensive when my Marketing charges are based on the number of customers I have listed. I feel like I'm at risk of being overchared by Marketing due to this "glitch" where duplicate customer entries are not being flagged.  Edit: Oops, I'm wrong. Since the duplicate customer entries don't have contact info, I wouldn't be charged for them.

 

Any idea why this isn't working anymore? I used to get tons of duplicate suggestions, making my customer list relatively easy to keep cleaned up. But now it hardly suggests duplicates anymore. I'm a tad suspicious that this problem started as soon as I signd up for Marketing...

 

Whether the flagging thing is fixed or not, it'd also be very helpful if the customer list didn't always refresh and start back at the top whenever customer data is edited. That makes changing any sort of customer info a near-impossible, hair-pulling, drudge of a task.

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Square Community Moderator

Hi @DaoDeJing

 

That does sound strange, especially given the size of your customer list. The duplicate suggestion should be triggered if two or more customers share the same email address and/or phone number. 

 

I haven't heard of any issues with the duplicate trigger system on my end, but it might be best if you call in to our CS Team so we can look at some of the examples that should be getting flagged as duplicates and report this over to our Engineering team to dig in further. 

 

Give our CS Team a call when you get a chance. 

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Ah, okay. I think I know what's going on then.

 

The thing is, I don't check out customers with the Appointments app when they arrive; I use the POS app. This is because my bookings are for group events, where the participants often wish to pay separately. So checking out for an entire service at a flat fee with one person doesn't work for my setup.

 

This means that pretty much every customer that makes a booking will get a duplicate entry (one for the Appointment that has their contact info, and one for their payment that just has their name). If they happen to use the same card that they made the booking with, or have used that card on a Square terminal before, then it recognizes them as a potential duplicate. Otherwise apparently not.

 

I guess there isn't much to be done to solve this problem for me. Perhaps if I changed to a different transaction model (selling event tickets, for instance) then it could be different. But as-is I guess I can just live with it.

 

But giving it more thought, I suppose this problem won't really increase my Marketing fees. Since the dupliate entry occurs when they check out and *don't* have an email or phone number to suggest that they're a duplicate, that duplicate entry won't be counted as a contact when calculating my Marketing fees. So it's not as bad as I thought.

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