Blocked customer able to join waitlist due to duplicate profile

[tomven]

Hi all,

I wanted to share something we noticed today and see if anyone else has experienced this.

We have a customer who has been blocked in Appointments due to repeated no-shows and last-minute cancellations. Despite being blocked, this customer was able to add themselves to our waitlist.

When we looked into it, we found they had created a new customer profile that was almost identical (mobile, surname etc) to the original except for:

• First name was now a nickname
• Email was the same except for one character being capitalised

I manually merged the profiles, but it raised two questions:

• Should blocked customers be able to add themselves to the waitlist?
• Is there a bug where Square doesn’t recognise emails as the same if a letter is capitalised? (Emails aren’t case-sensitive, so this shouldn’t matter)

Has anyone else come across this? Is this by design or something that needs attention? Keen to hear your thoughts and any workarounds you’ve found.

[_Violet · Accepted solution]

Hello @tomven and thank you for your post. I'm sorry to hear about this situation with the customer 😞

I checked in with the Square Appointments Team, and, unfortunately, this seems to be a limitation with how our blocking mechanism works. We block the customer profile, so if the blocked customer creates a booking or waitlist entry with a new profile (or as a guest), our system won't necessarily know to block them. The backend can sometimes detect when someone with a blocked profile has created a new profile, and will merge the old profile, but that would require all the contact information on both profiles to match. In this case, the blocked customer changed their name to work their way around this.

If you're confident this is the same customer, I would recommend merging the two profiles, so they can be recognized as the same customer, and prevent further bookings from them.

I hope this information is helpful but please do let me know if you have any additional questions.

[tomven]

Thanks @_Violet 

We actually had a second blocked customer get around this again last week (we literally only have 3 blocked customers).

Kinda annoying that it isn't prioritising email and phone number as the core data points to block given these are the most unique aspects of a customer profile.

Do you think this could be fixed in the future?

[Beubarber]

I am also curious about this. I have recently noticed I have blocked customers from booking and they are able to create a new appointment with the same name and the same phone number but using a different email. I don't know why the system would allow someone who is blocked from booking go online and book another appointment with the same phone number. This is an annoying flaw in this feature and pretty much makes it useless.

[_Violet]

Thank you for your feedback here, @tomven and @Beubarber.

Although this is a current feature gap, I understand why this is important for your business. I’ve shared your feedback with the Square Appointments Product Team, as they are constantly improving our products based on feedback like this. To learn more about how feature requests work, please see this post from one of our Square Community Moderators. 

We appreciate your input 🙏