What customer info is captured by Square when accepting a credit card payment?

[ChrisLuca]

What customer info is captured by Square when processing a credit card purchase?

[Kassi_]

Hi @ChrisLuca!

Whenever a payment is captured through Square, the only information captures is the last 4 digits of the card. You have the ability to save the customer's information with their card, if they elect to do so. Here are some instructions on how to do so at the time of checkout. 

1. Open the Square app and tap the three horizontal lines.
2. Tap Settings > Customer Management.
3. Toggle on Charge and Save Cards to Customer to save your customers’ payment card information to your in-app Customer Directory.
4. To save a card after a sale, toggle on Save Card After Checkout.
5. Upon completing a sale with a customer, you will see a small credit card icon with a + sign at the top of the screen. Tapping on this icon to select your customer’s name from your directory or select Save Card to New Customer.
6. Once you select the customer, you can either swipe the customer’s card again or enter their card information manually.

[JPWilkinson]

@Kassi_ Hi Kassi! We have a similar question but more about just the name of the customer. Our understanding was that when a client pays with a credit or debit card, their name information was captured during the transaction and entered into the customer directory. We are looking at starting a loyalty program and looking at the database, we see all these unknown customers with multiple transactions in their history... and have no idea who they are... We thought that there would be no need to add a customer to a ticket each time because that info would get added during the cashing out process.

Can you please advise on if there is some setting that we do not have set or if we need to do something ourselves to ensure that the customer's data is correct?

[Joe]

Hi @JPWilkinson - I can step in for Kassi on this one. 

The formal capturing of the customers name within a transaction will follow the same process listed by Kassi above. The cardholder’s name associated with a purchase is only automatically available for transactions where the payment card was swiped or dipped using the latest version of the Square Reader.

I hope that answers your question!

[JPWilkinson]

@Joe Hey Joe! So, I think that is the issue. 99% of our clients neither swipe, nor insert their credit, debit, credit/debit card into the Square Reader - they tap. Additionally, we have Apple and Google Pay being used via phones. It's an "Oh, wow!" moment when someone has to insert their card...

Currently, we have 886 customer profiles, most set-up via Instant Profile (via Payment) that do not have any name information in them. Some of them are Merged files - which means that they did not merge?

Regardless, this is a huge issue for us as we try to clean up the customer directory in anticipation of being able to start a loyalty program. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

[Joe]

Ah, this makes sense @JPWilkinson - you are correct, those customers who have payed using Apple Pay or use another Tap payment method would not have their name collected.

Unfortunately, there is no way to retroactively fix these customer profiles unless you had information for those customers to manually enter. You can choose to delete these empty profiles at any time, but they will have to be removed manually. This same resource will also provide some helpful workarounds for dealing with duplicates. 

[JPWilkinson]

So we should stop using the Instant Profile setting since we only do tap? This will stop us from having all these unknown customers?

[sayra]

Hello @JPWilkinson - Stepping in for Joe on this one. 

Instant profiles are customer profiles that are automatically created following a transaction, there is no way to stop this process.Take a look at more details here.

Let me know if you have any other questions. 

[JPWilkinson]

@sayra Hi Sayra! So, how do we stop the system from creating an instant profile if there is no name attached to the transaction? This is causing us a lot of headaches regarding a Customer Directory that is now full of meanless data - that we can't do anything with. We cannot filter by those customers that have an email address or phone number - so what's the purpose?

[Joe]

Hi @JPWilkinson - I am back and can step in for Sayra. This automatic profile creation was designed to help your directory grow by creating Instant Profiles from card sales that contain a customer’s basic information. We realize that this can be cumbersome and can create unwanted noise within the Directory if you are trying to keep it as organized as possible.

Unfortunately, at this time there is no way to stop the instant creation of profiles when a transaction is made. Like always, I am happy to pass your feedback to our Product Teams. 

[JPWilkinson]

@Joe Please do! Very few people swipe or insert their cards anymore - we are probably 99% TAP. If an instant profile is being automatically made but due to the customer using TAP instead of swipe or insert, and therefore no name information is kept - it's a completely useless feature. The system should recognize this and the employee should be prompted after the transaction to ask the customer for their contact info - if we haven't already assigned a customer to the ticket when it was first opened.

Instant profiles are a great idea - but if the way in which the data is captured is now antiquated - then the system needs to change - and quickly. This is not a feature request. This is a bona fide system update requirement. You can't have the system doing something automatically but only partially doing what it's supposed to. That's something that is broken and needs to be fixed - ASAP.

[Joe]

Thanks for the feedback, @JPWilkinson. We hear you. Instant Profiles were designed to make adding a new customer profile easier, in that one has already been started for you from each new transaction. I this regard, this feature is functioning as designed.

We do recognize that there is room for improvement here. We field thousands of feature requests each week here on the Seller Community, and bringing these features to fruition often takes an ample amount of time and effort from our engineers. We want to ensure that our releases are not just surface level products, but the best all-around resources to help you grow your business.

As soon as we have more info to share in regards to updates on this, we will reach back out and let everyone know here.

[JPWilkinson]

@Joe wrote:

Instant Profiles were designed to make adding a new customer profile easier, in that one has already been started for you from each new transaction. I this regard, this feature is functioning as designed.

> It's creating an instant profile but no useable data is being captured and since the system is not recognizing that no personal info was captured, it is not giving us the option of modifying the customer transaction at the time that it happened. We are a testament to this where we have almost 1,000 instant profiles that have no names attached to them - so we can do nothing with them. There is transaction history - one has over 64 transactions BUT we still don't know who they are - and as a basis for a loyalty program - is it really a good thing that we delete this transaction if and not be able to reward this person and the many others like him?