Register contacts and collect data

Follow

Collecting data in the onboarding phase should be done strategically. Make it as easy as possible for customers to join your loyalty program, and collect as much information as you need to start communicating and building a personalized and successful relationship.

In this article you'll learn about:

• Contact types
• Registration methods
• Strategy for collecting key information
• Address lookups

Contact types

'Contact types' is often used to categorize customers based on consent and how much information you have about them. Subscribing to your newsletter might just require their email address, but make sure you have a strategy for converting subscribers to loyal members.

Engage can handle several types of contacts in parallel. This is to track many pieces of information along the migration from an unknown web user with its cookie ID to becoming a paying customer. For this, Engage uses a strict unique data model for each step that needs to be managed in the system. Typically, these are the two major contact types.

• Contact
  Mainly used for email lists such as newsletter subscribers or prospects imported from some event. Typically, the data model for this contact type only uses email, or perhaps some demographic data such as a zip code.
  
  
• Member (or Customer)
  Often configured with the richest data model, where the person has given consent to share more information than an email address. As customers climb up the relationship steps, getting more benefits, they can also be requested to submit more information about themselves.

Registration methods

Collect all the information you need when the customer registers – regardless of what channel they choose to register from. Here are the most commonly used registration channels and methods.

Registration forms

Registration forms can be used to register new contacts and adding/changing data on existing ones. You can either design your form from scratch and we will build it for you or use the Engage standard template and we will customize it so that it fits your brand. Read more on how this is done here.

SMS-in

Register and onboard new customers by encouraging them to text your prefix together with their email (or personal identification number) to join, e.g., Send JOINENGAGE to 71550. The customer will receive an text message in return with a registration form to fill in additional contact information and to give their consent.

In Engage, this will be managed by setting up a pre-registration automation (trigger type New unverified contact) and send out a personalized link to the registration form via SMS.

POS

With an integration between your POS and Engage it is possible to register new members in your cash register. The cashier/customer enters the ID (often the personal identification number or mobile number) into a specific field, preferably directly on the “home screen” and the POS sends a request to Engage to verify membership status. Engage answers and the POS displays, within the “membership status panel”, that the member does not exist and suggests registration.

The cashier starts a customer registration process (according to a usual procedure), adds additional contact information to the customer profile and flags the profile as member.

The POS Accelerator (formerly known as Loyalty Bar)

If you don't have an integration between your POS and Engage it's possible for the Cashier to register customers using the Engage POS Accelerator. It is a "stand-alone" POS-window with the possibility to register, find and edit customer profiles (only the contact type Member). The POS Accelerator is accessed by your staff via a web browser using a touchscreen or keyboard + mouse.

Strategy for collecting data

As mentioned before, you want to make onboarding as easy as possible. Long registration forms can be a dealbreaker for some customers and collecting data you will never use is annoying for both of you in the long run.

1. Define a purpose for the data you collect. What basic information do you need as your foundation and how will you use it going forward?
   
   
2. Reflect on the future early on in the process. Look at different solutions and their requirements. You might want to enrich customer profiles with external data from third party solutions in the future which often requires specific contact information and identification methods.
   
   
3. Create a long-term vision and take into consideration what kind of data you might want to work with in the future.
   
   
4. Build your customer data strategy and secure future development.

Asking customers to fill in a lot of information at once might be a bit bold and not something we would recommend. Instead, we suggest you use our Address lookup service and customers won’t have to fill in everything manually.

Address lookups

An Address lookup is an effective way to automatically collect and add customer information from an external source. This makes it possible to autofill registration forms with external data and simplify the registration process.

By using a key identification method (normally the mobile number or the personal identification number), lookups can be performed in the following scenarios:

• SMS-in
  When a customer is registered via SMS-in, an automation is triggered to perform an Address lookup. The received data can then be populated in the registration form that is sent out to the customer so they can complete their registration and verify their contact information.
  
  
• POS/API
  When a customer is registered via POS, an instant lookup can be performed via API and the received data is displayed in POS. This gives the Cashier/customer a chance to verify the received information (i.e. that the owner of the phone number is the same person as the one standing in front of the Cashier).
  
  
• POS Accelerator
  When a customer is registered via the POS Accelerator, an instant lookup can be performed. The received data is displayed in the POS Accelerator for the Cashier/customer to verify (i.e. that the owner of the phone number is the same person as the one standing in front of the Cashier).
  
  
• Automations (add as an activity in any automation)
  When a customer is registered (regardless of channel/source) an automation can be triggered and perform an address lookup. The received data can then be shown to the customer for verification, e.g. in a pre-populated registration form sent via email or SMS.

With our current connections it is possible to automatically collect:

• First name
• Last name
• Address (Street, Zip code, Region)
• Protected identity
• Deceased/emigrated

Identification

In Sweden, it is common to ask customers for their ID/personal identification number at the checkout and use it to collect external information. The personal identification number generates external data with very high accuracy which makes registration quick and easy for the customer and your store staff. However, Sweden is a big exception when it comes to this.

In other European countries it is more common to use a mobile number as the identification method. Using mobile numbers to collect external information will not have as high accuracy as personal identification numbers but can still provide great value.

Tip! Use the address lookup and auto-populate the information in your registration process. Create a way for customers to verify the information to ensure accuracy.

Supported countries

Consumer Intelligence, CI