Customer contact email and phone hidden rules

[tdgjrb]

With Square for Retail using Square Register, I am able to see some email addresses and phone numbers of customers, but many of them are hidden and the pop up tip explains "This information exists for the customer, but you or your business doesn’t have access to view it."

I realize that there are policies and reasons for this, but it is not clear to me when my business gets access to this customer data and what steps we need to let the customer know to take if they want us to have this information.

I have not yet signed up for email or text marketing, and I'd like to understand if doing that will provide visibility to the customer contact details?

Can anyone explain the rules for making email and phone data visible to merchants?

Thanks

[TheRealChipA · Accepted solution]

Hi @tdgjrb.  Any customers in your directory with hidden contact information are what we call Square Network customers.  This means that they probably signed up for an email or text receipt with a different Square seller, which means that they can get receipts automatically from all Square sellers in the future.  However, per Square’s privacy agreements contact information is used but not shared with other sellers.

Having said that, if the customer signs up for our services (appointments, email list, loyalty program, etc) then that information seems to be (in my experience) made visible to me. But otherwise, I am not sure there is a way to make it visible unless the customer provided you with the information and you manually keyed it into their customer record in your directory.

Here is a link to a Square Help Document on customer information collection,. It includes various notes about hidden fields, why they are hidden, etc.  I think it will give you much more information that should be useful.

I hope that helps.

[tdgjrb]

Thanks @TheRealChipA! You are generous with your knowledge as always.

I perused the linked document before I posted my question, but I was scanning it for HIDDEN and didn't find anything. Upon closer reading I did find this. (I guess I should have looked for PRIVATE or NOT-VISIBLE).

I am hoping someone from Square can chime in here as it does seem like a customer should be able to easily choose to share email and phone with more than the first Square seller they happen to do business with.

Thanks

[TheRealChipA]

@tdgjrb You’re certainly welcome.

While you are waiting on someone from Square to chime in, I’ll add that you might get the ball rolling sooner by heading over to the Ideate Board and submitting a feature request to the Square Directory team.

In this case you’d want to be very clear to indicate that this is a feature that should be totally in a customer’s control, in keeping with Square privacy policies, etc. Just to give the engineers a warm fuzzy. Lol. 

If you do that, come back here and post the link to your request. I’ll definitely like/upvote it and lend my support.