Customer management in stores
This article explains how retailers can enable customer management capabilities at the point of sale (POS) in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce.
It's important that store associates can create and edit customer records at the POS. In that way, they can capture any updates to customer information such as the email address, phone number, and address. This information is helpful in downstream systems such as marketing, because the effectiveness of those systems depends on the accuracy of their customer data.
Sales associates can trigger the customer creation workflow from two POS entry points. They can select a button that is mapped to the Customer add operation, or they can select Create customer on the app bar on the search results page. In both cases, the New customer dialog box appears, where sales associates can enter required customer details, such as the customer's name, email address, phone number, address, and any additional information that is relevant to the business. That additional information can be captured by using the customer attributes that are associated with the customer. For more information about customer attributes, see Customer attributes.
Sales associates can also capture secondary email addresses and phone numbers. Additionally, they can capture the customer's preference about receiving marketing information via any of those secondary email addresses or phone numbers. To enable this capability, retailers must turn on the Capture multiple emails and phone numbers and consent for marketing on these contacts feature in the Feature management workspace in Commerce headquarters (Systems administration > Workspaces > Feature management).
Default customer properties
Retailers can use the All stores page in Commerce headquarters (Retail and Commerce > Channels > Stores) to associate a default customer with each store. Commerce then copies the properties that are defined for the default customer to all new customer records that are created. For example, the Create customer dialog box shows properties that are inherited from the default customer that is associated with the store. Those properties include the customer type, customer group, receipt option, receipt email, currency, and language. Any affiliations (groupings of customers) are also inherited from the default customer. However, financial dimensions are inherited from the customer group that is associated with the default customer, not from the default customer itself.
Note
The receipt email value gets copied from the default customer only if the receipt email ID is not provided for the newly created customers. This means that if the receipt email ID is present on the default customer, then all the customers created from the e-commerce site will get the same receipt email ID as there is no user interface to capture the receipt email ID from the customer. We recommend that you leave the receipt email field blank for the default customer of the store and use it only if you have a business process that depends on a receipt email address being present.
Sales associates can capture multiple addresses for a customer. The customer's name and phone number are inherited from the contact information that is associated with each address. The Addresses FastTab of a customer record includes a Purpose field that sales associates can edit. If the customer type is Person, the default value is Home. If the customer type is Organization, the default value is Business. Other values that this field supports include Home, Office, and Post box. The value of the Country field for an address is inherited from the primary address that is specified on the Operating unit page in Commerce headquarters at Organization administration > Organizations > Operating units.
Note
As the number of addresses associated with a customer grows, the performance of the system is adversely impacted. Microsoft recommends avoiding customizations that result in thousands of addresses for any customer.
Additional resources
Asynchronous customer creation mode