Transaction and Customer Import File Use Cases
The Transaction and Customer Import file is used for a variety of purposes and in a variety of cases. A transaction can be:
- Matched to a loyalty program member (eligible for awards)
- Matched to a non-member of the loyalty program (not eligible for awards)
- Matched to a new customer created during the import. The new customer can be eligible for awards – or not – depending on the program membership rules.
- Unmatched to any known or new customer (anonymous purchases, such as cash purchases).
Transactions that are not matched to a customer are used for the purposes of analyses and reports only, for example, to compare loyalty member sales vs. non-member sales.
Some standard Transaction and Customer Import file use cases:
For this scenario, each customer transaction has an associated email address. This might be true, for example, because the client’s e-commerce system requires an email to complete the customer’s check-out.
The imported transactions are matched against existing customers, including both members and non-members of the loyalty program. Any transactions matched to customers enrolled in the loyalty program are eligible for awards. Transactions matched to customers not enrolled in the loyalty program are not eligible for awards; however, these transactions can be considered in reports and analyses.
Transactions associated with a new email address result in a new customer account and matched transaction.
All transactions are used in customer segmentation and targeting and for reporting.
The client sends a Transaction and Customer Import file that includes credit card information to be used as the customer (shopper) identifier. Transactions that are paid for in cash may be included in the file.
Cash transactions are treated as anonymous and are used for reporting purposes only, to compare sales volumes over time.
Credit card transactions can be matched to a customer if the customer is registered and the credit card has been registered by the customer. If this is true, the transaction is eligible for awards. Credit card transactions that are not matched to a registered card are stored, and the credit card is stored as an encrypted unregistered credit card. That is, all of the transaction data is imported and stored. However, many of the transactions are not associated with a known customer and are used solely for reporting.
A client wants to import two years’ worth of past transactions and associated customer data prior to the program launch. This will enable segmenting customers based on their past purchasing history and other customer attributes, such as location and custom attributes. The client provides TIBCO Reward with a number of transaction files (in XML format) that include transactions and customer information.
As an option, if the client has implemented a points program and would like to award customers for purchases that happened prior to its program launch, this one-time import can be configured such that purchases made up to 12 months before the launch date can be awarded points.
The client can automatically enroll customers into the loyalty program. By providing the loyalty member flag in the Transaction and Customer Import file, the client determines whether a customer becomes a loyalty program member.
Besides transaction data, the Transaction and Customer Import process can be used to import customer data that includes custom attributes.
If the client uses an external analytics tool to segment customers, then the client can import each externally defined attribute as a custom attribute, and then segment customers based on the attribute(s) within the TIBCO Reward system.
To do this, the client creates a Transaction file that does not have transaction information; rather, it includes customer information, including custom attribute values. By enabling updates within the file import process, the client is able to update all existing customer records and to populate the custom attribute values. New customers will still be created if the customer is not found in TIBCO Reward’s database. Note that custom attributes must be set up in advance of import.
Transaction information can include store location. This information is used for reporting and enabling store-specific offers.
For example, suppose a client who has just opened a new store wants to create a offer that awards double points to customers who shop at the store on the opening weekend. The CRMS allows clients to create an offer and limit the offer to specific stores. For this offer to work, the transaction file must include the store information.
This requires integration with the Store file.
During the initial data integration that occurs during the onboarding process, you can establish whether you want to award at the time the receipt was issued (the ReceiptDateTime) or at the time the order was shipped (ShipDateTime).
This rule is set up during the onboarding process and applies to all transaction files.
A client can also use the transaction and customer file to simply create customer records in the TIBCO Reward database. The client needs to pass minimal transaction information that will allow the file to be processed in addition to adding the new customer data.
TIBCO Reward will match customers based on the identifiers set up during on-boarding (such as email address or client customer identifier or loyalty id). If a match is found, the customer record will be updated or not based on the decisions made during on-boarding. If no match is found, a new customer is created in the TIBCO Reward database using the information provided.
Clients typically use this process when they host the sign up pages and don’t want to implement real-time integration with TIBCO Reward. In this case, they send a daily file with new members of the loyalty program to TIBCO Reward.