Running your day
Customers
A customer record is created the first time somebody joins a queue or makes a booking, and everything they do afterwards attaches to it. It is where you look to answer “have we seen this person before?” and where you go when they ask what you hold about them.
The directory
Customers lists everybody, with a search across names and contact details. Records belong to the organisation rather than to a branch, so somebody who visits Camden on Monday and Shoreditch on Friday is one person with one history — which is the whole point of having a history.
Needs the permission customers.view (view customers). Owners and Admins have every permission by default.
You can also add somebody by hand, for a customer you know about before they have ever joined a queue.
What a record holds
- Their name, mobile number and — if you collect it — email address.
- Every visit and booking, newest first, across every branch, with the location, queue or service, and how it ended.
- Your team's notes.
- Whether they have opted in to marketing, and whether they have opted out of messages altogether.
Notes
Notes are for the things that make the next visit better: what they usually have, who they normally see, that they are allergic to something. They are visible to anybody on your team who can view the customer.
Needs the permission customer_notes.create (create customer notes) and customer_notes.view (view customer notes). Owners and Admins have every permission by default.
Write notes as if the customer will read them
A note is personal data about a real person, and a subject access request includes it. Record facts that help you serve them, not opinions about them.
Data requests
People have a right to a copy of what you hold about them and, in most cases, to have it deleted. Both are on the customer's own page.
Export
Produces a file containing everything held against that customer — their details, every visit and booking, notes, consent records and the messages sent to them. It is intended to be handed straight to the person who asked.
Erase
Removes the personal details from the record. The visits themselves stay, stripped of who they belonged to, so your counts and reports for past months do not change underneath you — you keep the fact that a visit happened, and lose the person.
Needs the permission customers.delete (delete customers). Owners and Admins have every permission by default.
Erasing cannot be undone
There is no recovery, and the same person joining again afterwards is a new record with no history. Export first if there is any chance you need the detail.
Opt-outs and consent
Two different things are recorded, and it is worth keeping them apart:
- Marketing consent — they agreed to hear from you about things other than their visit. Captured with the exact wording they were shown at the time, and required before any campaign reaches them.
- Messaging opt-out — they replied STOP, or unsubscribed. This stops messages to them, and it is not something to work around.
See marketing for how consent is captured and sender numbers for how opt-outs are handled.
Who can see what
Viewing, creating, editing and deleting customers are separate permissions, so a Reader can look somebody up without being able to change or erase them. See team and roles.
Contact details are visible to anybody who can view a customer
There is a separate permission for sensitive data in the taxonomy, but it does not currently restrict anything: a member of staff who can view a customer can see their mobile number and email address. Bear that in mind when deciding who gets the Reader role.
Branch restrictions do not apply here
Restricting somebody to one location scopes the waitlist, the appointments and the alerts they can receive. It does not scope the customer directory, because a customer belongs to the organisation and not to any one branch. Somebody who can view customers can view all of them.