Merging Customers
Customers can contact support through a variety of different communication channels. They can also provide information in varying degrees and certainty. As a result, it is quite common for there to be multiple entries for the same customer in a system.
For example, a customer named Meghan may contact support about a return she would like to make through the chat channel and provide her primary email address.
-
The advisor takes down her information and helps her resolve the issue.
-
A few days later, Meghan contacts support again about an order she placed to see if she can change the order. However, this time she contacts support through an alternative email to what she provided during the chat. It is the same customer, but because the contact information is different.
With this many contact points for the same person, it is quite possible that Meghan has three different customer entries in the company's database.
To help facilitate the management of extensive customer records, advisors can merge customers in the application. Merging allows advisors to take the information of multiple separate customers in the application and bring it together into one target customer entry. This enables advisors to eliminate extraneous customer entries, thus reducing the amount of customer management required.
When customers are merged into one target customer, conflicting information is overwritten. Therefore, it is important to remember that merging customer is a permanent action and cannot be undone. Once the customer entries are merged, the customer information that was not chosen to carry over is discarded. Once the entries have been merged, advisors can begin adding any customer details that may still be pertinent, such as alternative email addresses.
Important things to note about merging customers:
-
Only individual customers can be merged. Corporate and Group customers cannot be merged.
-
The customers you are merging must already exist in the application. New customers that have not been saved cannot be merged. For more information about new customers, see Creating Customers.
-
Depending on how your system is configured, you may be able to merge customers that exist in multiple departments or be restricted to only merging customers in the same department.
-
The customers you are merging must have no activities locked by other users in the application.
-
Customers cannot be merged if they have open activities in the application that are in a transit state. The activities must be closed or have the following statuses: "in queue waiting to be assigned" or "assigned to a user".
To merge customers:
-
Navigate to the Customer
pane. -
In the Customer Details tab, click the More button.
-
Select the Merge option.
-
In the Merge Customer window, provide search terms to locate the customers with which you want to merge the current customer. The simple options for search terms include:
-
Customer Type
-
Customer Preferred Agent Username
-
Customer Name
You can also use the Complex button to use alternative methods of searching for customers. For more information, see Searching for Customers.
-
-
When you have provided the desired search terms, click Start Search.
-
From the Results pane, select the customer with whom you want to merge the current customer.
-
Click Merge Customer. The window refreshes to show the details of the customer records for both customer entries.
-
From the customer record, click the radio buttons next to the details that you want to mark as the correct information for the target customer. The information that will be retained appears in the column on the right.
Note that when a customer ID is selected for the target customer, all other customer entries not selected are deleted in the merging process.
-
The contact info section displays the contact methods for the customer entries that have already been provided. These values are merged into the target customer and none are deleted to ensure there is always an entry in the application for these contact points.
-
Click the Yes, merge records checkbox.
-
Click the Merge button. The details are merged into the target customer.
Related Topics