The family's warehouse in the client's card: the type of relatives, the history of the people and the base without duplicates

In retail, particularly in children’s goods, clothing, or gift stores, customer loyalty is built not only through discounts but also through personalized attention. 

The "Family Members" mode in Torgsoft is an important marketing tool that allows you to store information about a customer’s relatives in order to offer them promotions at the right time and provide holiday discounts. 

When implementing this mode, business owners encounter practical aspects of maintaining the database, and the following questions arise most often: 

Below, we will examine in detail how the "Family Members" mode works and provide clear answers to all these business-related questions.

1. How to add relatives and what information is required

For information about relatives to be taken into account by the program, it must be entered in the customer card. For this purpose, the customer editing form includes a special "Family Members" tab.

Using the standard buttons, you can add children or other family members and specify their name and date of birth. Based on this information, the program automatically calculates the child’s age in full years. The collected information allows the business owner to create flexible selections by applying filters by birth month or age in order to organize targeted bulk mailings, for example, offers for parents of infants or teenagers.

Answer to business owners’ question about identical names

There are often doubts about whether two family members with the same name can be added. In Torgsoft, data uniqueness is verified not only by name but also by date of birth. Therefore, you can add two or more family members with the same name without any issues, provided that their dates of birth are different. For the convenience of cashiers, the "Family Members" working form also includes an informative column showing the discount percentage and the type of the customer’s discount card.

2. Birthday discounts: calculation rules and unusual situations

The main purpose of maintaining family member information is to provide a discount for a birthday. It is configured in the Settings - Parameters - Discounts menu.

Here, the owner can specify:

• Holiday discount percentage.

• Application rule: it can either replace the customer’s current discount if the holiday discount is higher or be added to it.

• Validity period: for example, five days before the birthday and two days after it.

• Age limit: you can set a maximum child age after which, for example at 18 years old, the discount will no longer be provided.

Does the discount apply to VIP customers and bonus cards? 

Yes, the program includes separate switches. The birthday discount can be extended to VIP customers. For customers using the bonus system, this discount can be provided not as a percentage but as additional bonuses credited to their account.

Answers to questions about matching dates and leap years:

• If the customer and a family member, or two children, have birthdays on the same date, the system will send exactly as many greetings as there are birthday celebrants. The discount will also be offered the corresponding number of times, and the cashier will need to select the person to whom it should be applied during the sale.

• If a person was born on February 29 in a leap year, the program processes this date correctly. In non-leap years, the birthday is interpreted as March 1, and the discount is provided taking this date shift into account.

3. Automating greetings: bulk mailings

One of the most common requests from users was to automate the greeting process so that they would not have to spend time every day searching for birthday celebrants and sending SMS messages manually.

For this purpose, Torgsoft includes an automatic greeting mailing feature. After enabling the "Send Mailing Automatically" switch and setting the sending time, the program will send messages to birthday celebrants automatically every day using the application server. A special template is created for the mailing with the "Happy Birthday" mailing type. Variables such as <first name>, <last name>, <patronymic>, <days until birthday>, and others can be added so that the message is as personalized as possible.

4. Avoiding duplicates and merging cards across a retail chain

As the customer database grows, duplicate records inevitably appear. This most often happens when a husband and wife, or other family members, receive different discount cards at different stores within the retail chain. As a result, the discount accumulates separately on each card, which is inconvenient for customers and creates confusion in the database.

What should be done with duplicate records? 

Torgsoft includes a convenient "Merge Customer with Another Customer" feature. This action allows the entire purchase history, discounts, and information about relatives to be transferred from one card to another.

Procedure:

1. Select the duplicate customer who needs to be merged with the primary card.

2. Click the "Merge Customer with Another Customer" button and select the customer’s primary card in the search window. All further records will be maintained on this card.

3. After confirmation, the system recalculates the total discount based on the combined purchases. The duplicate card is deleted, and its barcode becomes available for issue to a new customer.

Synchronizing merged records across the retail chain

Business owners are often concerned that duplicate records may reappear after synchronization with other stores. The program resolves this automatically. If customers are merged on the central computer or server of the retail chain, information about the merge is transmitted to all other outlets. The merge is performed strictly according to card barcodes. Therefore, regardless of differences in how names were entered, for example, "Alexander" at one checkout and "Alex" at another, the system identifies the records by the same barcode and organizes the databases of all stores in the chain.