Customer management in stores

Note

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This article explains how retailers can enable customer management capabilities at the point of sale (POS) in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce.

Store associates need to create and edit customer records at the POS. When store associates use this approach, 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 start 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 extra information that's relevant to the business. You can capture that extra information 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 come from the customer group that is associated with the default customer, not from the default customer itself.

Note

The receipt email value comes from the default customer only if the receipt email ID isn't provided for the newly created customers. This condition means that if the receipt email ID is present on the default customer, then all the customers created from the e-commerce site get the same receipt email ID as there's no user interface to capture the receipt email ID from the customer. To avoid confusion, 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 come from the contact information 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/region field for an address comes 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

Convert asynchronous customers to synchronous customers

Customer attributes

Offline data exclusion