'Edit customer' button retrieving more than just Reference ID

[tommojunior]

Hi Everyone

At our club, selecting the customer when starting a bill is very important - We have a business need to capture each customer buys over time. Each customer has a unique 3-digit number which we've put into the 'Reference ID' attribute of the user records. We also store mobile and home phone numbers as well as addresses in the standard attributes. We also use customer's mobile numbers to send receipts too - It's all valuable data..

When on the POS (Resturaunt), we press the 'edit customer' button and enter the 3-digit number of the member. The problem we have is that that search is also bringing back the phone numbers and house numbers - Because of the large size of our customer database, it's slow for the staff to scroll down to find the customer number.

As a workaround, we've prefixed the Reference ID with 'C' - Staff can search by entering:

  Space -> C' -> XYZ and find the member they are after.

This is still too slow, they just want to type the 3-digit number and have the customer appear at the top every time.

Can anyone offer a solution or workaround please? Are all the attributes on the customer records searchable from the POS (are custom ones?)? Can we heavily hyponate phone numbers and stop the POS search from finding them, yet still have the SMS receipt functionality work?

Thanks in advance

Mark

[Seamus · Accepted solution]

Hey @tommojunior,

Thanks for reaching out!

My personal suggestion for finding customers to add to a sale in a faster manner it to simply ask them their name - usually entering the first few letters of their name will bring up a list of customers with the closest match. If not, then the more letters in their name you enter, the more accurate the results become.

Unfortunately I don't have a solution that will be as easy as entering 3 numbers though, as like you've pointed out, this will also bring up phone numbers. You won't be able to hyphenate phone number as a solution - entering non numeric values in there would invalidate the formatting of the phone number.

[tommojunior]

Tks. 

So what we've done in the end is to put customer phone numbers in a custom field. Now they are no longer searchable from 'Edit customer'. We've lost the ability to send sms receipts as a result, but saved vital seconds hundreds of times per day for our staff. 

Feature request to toggle customer attributes as searchable or not? 

[Seamus]

Hey @tommojunior,

No reason it can't be! For the sake of transparency I'm not sure this one would have a lot of demand, and it's the first time I've heard it - but you're free to put this up as a feature request and see if it gains traction then that would help make a compelling case for it!