Customer data: visible to us?

[bandoraone]

When a customer signs up for a loyalty program at the register is it classified as "added by you" or "added by square"? In other words, do we have access to his email/phone number? I understand that the online orders are visible completely and those who decide just to receive a receit by email/phone are not visible. But what about the "loyalty" customers who provided their data to earn stars?

[EJ_]

Hi there. 

These customers will fall under the more broad category of Reachable Customers. Reachable Customers are the people in your directory that you can contact. This list combines customers you may have imported or added that have email addresses, and customers Square has added based on their engagement with your business.

With the new Loyalty feature, customers no longer need to receive a receipt to accumulate rewards. Once they enroll in your Loyalty and Rewards program, you'll be able to search their rewards in your Customer Directory. 

[bandoraone]

This is not very fair, I must admit. We encourage customers to join the loyalty program and essentially provide their personal data not because that they need a receipt but because they want to join OUR loyalty. That data should be available for us directly, not via the markteting channel.

To a more broad question about customer reachability it would be fair when a cusotmer enters his details even for a receipt they should have an option (checkbox?) to share data with us. I'm ok to pay for that service but at the end of the day the cusotmers that are entered to the system at our register should be available to us directly.

[EJ_]

I definitely agree with you there! The ability to have a customer opt-in to not only the Loyalty Program but also your Customer Directory would be very beneficial to sellers. 

I'll pass that to our Product Team most definitely. 

Also note, you can choose to add customers to your Directory at the point of sale as well. You would need to ask for their information and enter it during the sale. 

You can read up on this here.

[bandoraone]

We'd love to switch completely to Square for the CRM but the problem is it's not sophisticated enough. The newsletter format is oversimplified comparing to Mailchimp for example plus there is no SMS capability. The current situation has a few friction points: when we sign a customer we need to entice her with something, right (cost #1), when we do loyalty (otherwise what't the point for them to sign) it's another reoccuring cost (cost #2), when we run a campaign to the "reachable" (which is a cost #3, but minimal) we essentially asking them to share their information for real and join our private customer list - and this time we have to attract them again with a prise (cost #4). Is it too complicated? Are we missing something?

The biggest frustration IMO is to have the phone customers totally unreachable. Many add their phone for the receipt instead of emails and we have no way to communicate back. Big miss for Squrae and us. 

The overall challenge for us is that we don't have a single place where we can collect customer information (without asking them to provide it multiple times), see all the customer spendings and patterns, and run marketing campaigns via different channels (email, phone, social). There is large room to improve for SQ.