Clients versus Customers in Appointments and Point of Sale

[GFM]

Would someone be willing to comment on the difference between Customers (in the POS system) and Clients (in the Appointments).   How are they treated different, does the information get combined, recommendations for checking out my clients in either?  Thank you.

[Tom · Accepted solution]

Hi @GFM, thanks for bringing this up — great question! I had to do a bit of research to get more clarity on this, myself.🧐

Generally speaking, Point of Sale Customers' and Appointments Clients' profiles contain the same details. The difference comes down to point of view: Appointments is focused on the appointment experience itself, while Customer Directory enables you to view and engage with your customers (and clients) at a deeper level. I'm including a few key differences that I uncovered below — hopefully comparing and contrasting their features is helpful.

Customers — Point of Sale:

• Purpose - Customer details can be viewed and managed from your Directory tab. This is where you can also see all of your customers' activity at your business.
• Management - You can search, sort, filter, and group your customers as needed. In addition, you can even save filtered groups to keep track of your VIPs or most recent customers.
• Engagement - Looking at a customer's profile in the Directory tab, you can send a direct message to them. This can come in handy when you need to follow up on an order, or let a customer know they left something at your business.

Clients — Appointments:

• Purpose - Client details can be viewed and managed from your Clients tab. This is where you can view your client's Appointment history.
• Management - You can also search for clients based on phone, email, or name — note that sorting, filtering, and grouping is limited on this tab as it is focused on appointment management.
• Engagement - While automated notifications are sent, you cannot message customers directly from here as you can from your Customer Directory.

Additional Information:

• Customer profiles can be added manually (from the Point of Sale app or online Square Dashboard), or automatically.

• Since customer or client information can be added through each service, you may want to consider merging duplicate profiles. For more details on that, have a look at fixing duplicate profiles.

• Regarding checking out your clients, you should be able to do so directly in the Square Appointments app by selecting Checkout — just be sure that the appropriate services, products, client details, and staff member are included with the sale before checking out.

Hopefully this helps clear things up a bit more. Definitly let me know if this brings up any other questions or concerns.👍

[GFM]

Fabulous!   Please forgive my low expectation when I say this is more detail than I imagined. Saved me a lot of time, waiting to notice these differences as they occur. 

Thank yiu, truly. 

[Tom]

Glad this helped, @GFM. Let us know if anything else comes up! 💯