Description: Assign a Customer Type easily in QSR & Delivery by recalling the customer profile and selecting the Customer Type button from the right. Review how to assign a Customer Type as well as an overview of what each Customer Type is below.
How to Assign a Customer Type
To assign a Customer Type:
- Look up the customer so you can see the available options. This assignment does require a customer to be already set up within the system.
- Once you have the customer's profile loaded, the available options display to the right of the customer's information fields. From here, select the Customer Type button on the right side of the screen.
- A pop-up with the available Customer Type options appears. You can select the type from the pre-programmed list.
Once you've selected the desired Customer Type, this shows up directly next to the customer's phone number, as shown below. In our example, we have this customer set to the "Home" Type.
Note: If you do not manually assign a Customer Type, the customer's profile is 'undefined' in the system. This does not cause any problems or break the database. It just means that the customer information will not be cataloged appropriately. - To save your changes, press Take Order at the top of the screen and choose Yes on the prompt to save your changes.
Customer Type Explanations
Review each of the available Customer Type options below, with an explanation of how they can be used as well as an example to help you better understand them.
Home
The "Home" Customer Type is the standard type associated with a customer profile and is the default assigned when creating a new customer. Home defines the customer's profile as their primary residence. There is no special functionality or features associated with this Customer Type, unlike the others explained below.
Other
The "Other" Customer Type has no special connotations associated with it. It just indicates that the customer's profile does not fall under any other available Customer Types. Selecting "Other" is rare. Doing so does not harm the database or break any functionality, but this Customer Type should be used sparingly as most customers are calling from their primary residence (Home) or some sort of business, hotel, hospital, or school.
Example of an Other Customer Type (random Vendor Service):
You may choose to add one of your Vendors to your customer database to retain reporting, enable check acceptance, or add the House Account functionality. This is shown in the example below, however, the Other type is not limited to this reasoning.
Hotel
The "Hotel" Customer Type allows you to add hotels within your delivery range into your system. By adding a Hotel, you have the ability to attach room numbers, names, and phone numbers for the customers calling from that hotel.
The Hotel would be the main customer, and the people staying at the hotel who place the orders are "temporary customers" stored within another section of the database. This is ideal for maintaining an active customer portfolio rather than saving individuals staying at the hotel in the primary customer database.
Example of Hotel Customer Type (Hilton):
Once you've established the hotel as a customer, there will be a Hotel Lookup button available on the Customer Lookup.
Select the hotel that the customer is calling from and press Take Order. This prompts you to enter the caller's Room Number, Name, and Phone Number.
On the Order Now screen, you see that the customer information shows as the Hotel and not the special information you entered about your caller.
If the order is Delivery, the printout contains the information you entered about your caller. The check information also contains the information accessible from the POS.
Business
The Customer Type “Business” allows you to add a business to your customer database and catalog that customer profile as such. Marking a customer as a business allows you to accept calls from the Caller ID for that business and have the business information show up rather than an individual customer.
Adding a Business account to the customer database allows you to set up the business as the primary customer and the caller as a temporary customer associated with the business. This functions like the “Hotel” in that it allows the user to enter the caller’s Extension, Name, and Phone Number at the time of the order rather than having every person at the business as their own customer profile.
The Business should be the primary customer and anyone calling from the business is a subsidiary customer to the primary profile. Each caller is saved to the Temporary Customer database rather than the primary customer database, where the business is stored. This prevents duplicate entries for the same profile.
Example of a Business Customer Type (Shift4):
Whenever you associated a customer with a ticket defined as a Business, you are always prompted to enter the caller’s specific information: Extension, Name, and Phone Number.
If the phone number was generated from the Caller ID, the user needs to manually attach the Business customer profile to the ticket first, and then they can utilize the additional prompts.
Although you’ve entered the caller’s information in the additional prompts field(s), the actual customer information (the business) is displayed on the ticket.
The additional information is stored in a special part of the database and prints out on checks, delivery orders and can be viewed through the check details screen on the POS.
Hospital
The Customer Type “Hospital” allows you to save a hospital within your delivery range to your database. Similar to a Hotel or Business, the Hospital is the primary customer and anyone calling from the Hospital is a subsidiary member of the primary profile.
Callers are stored as temporary customers after choosing the Hospital as the primary customer to be added to the ticket.
Example of Hospital Customer Type (Lehigh Valley Health Network):
Once you’ve selected the hospital as the customer for the ticket, press Take Order. Doing so prompts the user for additional information about the specific caller which is segmented to the temporary customer database instead of the primary customer database.
'Additional information includes Room Number, Name, Department, and Floor Number. This information is not necessary to store as its own customer in the database which is why it's separated from the temporary customer database.
Although you entered the caller’s additional information in the prompts (shown above), the primary customer is still the hospital, which shows on the Order Now screen.
The additional information is stored in a special part of the database and prints out on checks, delivery orders, and can be viewed through the check details screen on the POS.
School
The Customer Type “School” allows you to add a school within your delivery range to your primary customer database. Schools often receive discounts or special promotions by ordering in quantity.
Additionally, many schools may either pay based on Invoice (House Account) or by Check and are Tax Exempt, features only available based on the permissions assigned to their customer profile.
Therefore, adding a school to the customer database can help you should you need to utilize any of these features.
Example of a School Customer Type (Mankato Middle School):
Unlike Business, Hotel, and Hospital, the “School” Customer Type offers no additional prompts. A school should be utilized when the organization itself is placing an order. Someone calling to place an order from the school (as an individual) should be associated with their own primary customer profile.
The main intention of using the School Customer Type is to allow House Account, Tax Exempt, and Check Acceptance which may not be available to an individual ordering from the school who is paying for their order personally.
Special Notes
You should be utilizing Customer Types correctly, especially when speaking to Businesses, Schools, Hotels, or Hospitality. If you do not catalog a customer profile correctly, you could run into issues with duplicate entries.
If you add 10 instances of a customer with the same phone number to your database, you will receive errors that require a SQL expert to delete records in SQL. This will ultimately cause gaps and missing customer records.
A common mistake that occurs is adding each employee who calls from a business to their system as their own customer profile but associated with the business telephone number. Once you have entered 10 instances of customers with the same phone number, you will no longer be able to access any of those profiles until a SQL expert deletes the redundancies.
In the example above, you should add one instance of a customer with that phone number to their database and define that profile as either Business, Hospitality, or Hotel. Once you’ve done so, no matter who calls from that number, you only have a single profile to work with. The additional prompts associated with the Customer Type allow you to define the specific caller information at the time of the call.
Anyone who is ordering for themselves personally unassociated with their place of business should have their own individual customer profile. Therefore, there are two records if someone orders from their place of employment and from their personal residence. As long as you have these profiles set up and added to your customer database correctly, there are no errors.
Example:
- If I call from the Shift4 phone number, you should be using the Business Customer Type and the additional prompts for my call.
- If I call from my personal cell phone, you should be using the Home Customer Type, and my primary residence.
Note: You can add “alternative” addresses to any customer profile. Therefore, if a customer orders from a local pizza place from their home, they will likely be added to the customer database with their personal information. If that customer also orders from that same business using their cell phone, but when they are at work, you can add an “alternative address” to the personal customer profile with their place of employment. You can define one address as “Home” and the other as “Business,” which prompts you to select when they place an order. This is a perfect solution for someone who often orders from 2 locations (no matter what those locations are) but only needs one customer profile added to their POS system.
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