My co-worker is having an issue managing customers in his data-base. The issue is when an order goes through the customer needs to be added to the data-base. But if the customer exists we don’t want to make a duplicate customer we want to keep the same customer and just add to their sales history. He is having a hard time figuring out how to full proof that. Associates sometimes enter the sale, and can sometimes enter information not exactly as they did before so when his system checks to see if the customer already exists, it thinks its a new customer when in fact the customer already existed, but the info was entered slightly different.
Does anyone have any ideas about how to go about this?
Thanks.
Add one more step as part of the order completion process. This step should do a fuzzy search on the customer records to see if it can find a full or partial match for a customer.
If it finds something close, display the records and ask the user to either pick one or go on to create a new record.
Obviously, you wouldn’t want to expose that to the end customers. Instead just ask them if they’ve ordered before and to put in their log in information.