Combine Guest Customers into one contact

Contacts
1

I am attempting to clean up our contact database. Is there an easier way of combining all of the Guest Customer contacts than clicking each blank contact and then combining through the contact page? I hope I am just overlooking something, because this is a long and painful process.

2

You could hire a consultant to do the work for you. I have found that projects like this are often a better bang for your buck hiring it out.

3

We’re not quite prepared to hire a consultant yet. I have just decided to go about it in a slightly different manner that has saved a lot of time:

  1. Use the List Builder to create a list of ALL contacts
  2. Export the list as a CSV to excel
  3. Use the table features in excel to narrow the list to the contacts you are wanting to combine into Guest Customer
  4. Copy all the Customer Numbers onto the Import Customer sheet
  5. Fill all First Name fields with “Guest”, fill all Last Name fields with “Customer”
  6. Save and import back into WineDirect
  7. Go to Contacts and search for First Name: Guest, Last Name: Customer
  8. Use the select all checkbox to select an entire page at a time and combine until they are all in one contact

This may seem cumbersome, but it is the best work around I could find. This method allowed me to combine 900 contacts in about 15 minutes. If I keep up with it every couple of weeks, it will not amount to much time at all. Hopefully, our staff will do a better of job of getting customer info from now on.

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4

But the way WineDirect works it will continue to create new guest customers each time you have a person visit the tasting room that is not in your database and so this problem never ends?

5

That is correct as long as you are not adding the new customer into your database. This is why we have been training our staff to request the necessary information of every new customer. However, there will always be some new every week due to busy days or staff oversight. That is why I will have to keep up with this at least every 2 weeks to keep it manageable. It would be nice if there were a tool in WineDirect to address this issue.

6

@August1 on step 3, when you have the list of ALL contacts in an Excel spreadsheet, how are you determining which contacts should be combined into this general “Guest Customer” contact? Which column are you looking at and sorting?

8

@carisen
First, I leave any contacts with an email alone. Then any records missing either a First or Last name or both are combined into the “Guest Customer” contact. The ones with emails are left alone for newsletter purposes. The others are combined because there is no way of matching these customers again.

9

Hmm, interesting. When processing a transaction for a Guest Customer, it should not create a new contact. Here is the flow we would expect to see: http://recordit.co/w6ML6obUHE

As you can see, in this flow, the order is recorded under “Guest Customer” but no new contacts are created.

When clients report seeing a lot of blank contacts, often times they are clicking on “Add New Contact” instead of completing the transaction as Guest Customer. Here is the flow I am describing: http://recordit.co/9TWZu5oFF2 > Admin Panel: http://recordit.co/9RGp8kJ0bz

Could this be why you are seeing a lot of blank contacts? In general, guest checkouts shouldn’t cause this issue.

10

I think I know what the problem is then. I don’t think that our team is intentionally adding a blank contact. However, when a tab is placed on hold without a contact associated with it, apparently the system adds it automatically as a blank contact. I just tried it and when I place a tab on hold without assigning a contact, when I resume it, “No Name” appears in the contact field, just as the clip showed. This makes a lot more sense now. So it comes down to making sure our staff are gathering information required, or at least not holding the tab without it.

11

Ahh, that makes sense! Thanks for digging into it further. I’m sure you will have significantly less of these Blank Contacts once the change to the workflow is adopted. I’ll provide this feedback to our team as well to consider designing a better way for handling Guest tabs :slight_smile:

12

Thank you. That would be great

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13

@August1 We made a change to the Clear Contact functionality today which should help smoothen this workflow. When resuming an Order, “No Name” will appear in the Contact field. Previously, if you select Clear Contact, both the contact name and the contents of the cart will be removed from the order. After today, selecting Clear Contact will only remove the contact and not the items in the cart.

We still encourage you to gather the information required or assign the order to a Contact, but if you want to checkout the transaction as a “Guest Customer”, you can now do so by selecting Clear Contact. Processing an order under “Guest Customer” will not create a new Contact record.

Hope this helps!

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14

Thanks @carisen.

15

When you combine two customers into one contact, does it keep all the purchases between the two?

16

Yes.

17

I am not showing it puts the total purchases of both. I want the history and to show the total they spent. Is there anything I can do to show the grand total?

18

never mind it just takes a few minutes-thank you!

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