Deferred Customer account numbers
It would be nice to be able to add a customer account number when creating a new customer as well as just their name. Xero has an option to assign account numbers to customers which is handy when sending out statements as customers can use their account number as a reference when making payment. Right now I have to add account numbers manually in xero once the customer has been created in DEAR.
This one i really needed. There is absolutely no good explanation for having the name at the unique identifier for a customer.. Stupid workarounds have to be implemented when selling to B2C customers where you have many John Smith's
Completely agree. This needs to be implemented asap. We've recently discovered that two retail customers (via Shopify), with the same name have been merged into one 'Customer' in Dear, (with two contacts). Seems like this could be a serious data protection issue.
If this has been deferred Dear should really given a reason as to why.
I was totally flabbergasted when I found out that Dear couldn't support 2 customers having the same name. At first I thought it was a mistake so even after their support told me it was not possible I opened another ticket in case the support agent had given me the wrong info.
Every other system I have come across uses a unique number for the customer.
Any update on this request? We are setting up DEAR and want to sync a unique customer account number to Xero (which has a field for "Account number"). But there is no corresponding field in DEAR. Can it be achieved with a custom attributes with a specific name?
Not a single comment from DEAR. Whats the point in having a feature request if you don't even reply to the most trending topic!
Yes please!
How has this been a feature request for over 7 years and never been implemented?
Please implement this ASAP!
I'm really wondering how the most popular feature request, very simple to fix and created on this forum 7 years ago can still be completely ignored by Dear.
Can someone from the team reply?
The CSV update issue is frustrating. I would expect to see just the Dear Customer ID in the first column though. So that the importer can check the ID to see if we have changed the name of the customer. Changing customer names in bulk can be really helpful. Much like updating products and syncing by SKU.
I agree that this would be a great feature to have.
couldn't agree with more with @Alex Ludo
Because of the lack of a unique customer number I am unable to make any changes to a CSV and import that information.
This has had a negative ripple on our accounting department as well as fulfillment.
Please Dear, implement customer numbers.
If MYOB is able to offer a customer number that you can opt in or out of, surely Dear can.
@Tristan Thomas
Maybe this works for you and we can always change try to change our workflows and adapt to a system, but it doesn't mean the system cannot be improved.
This is especially true when the feature request is as basic as this.
Here are a few things that make the lack of a visible customer ID / address ID really problematic :
- Cannot change the customer names via CSV import
- Because the addresses don't have a "Company name" field, the customer name is the one being used for billing/shipping and we can't use "John Smith 1234"
- The customer additional attributes where a custom "Customer Code" could be used cannot be retrieved by the API or used in printing documents
- Potential issues with special characters in customer names
- Email could be a good workaround but it is tied to a contact and not at the customer level
Really hoping that Dear could take this more seriously
"Customers have a Name. They should also have a unique identifier that can be chosen by the user. "
They do. ITS THE NAME FIELD. IT'S UNIQUE.
Call them "John Smith 1234" if you insist on having a customer number. As I said, I can't see any use for a customer number in the modern world, but there are plenty of ways to work around this if it's critical to your business and you're unwilling to change your workflow.
Blah blah blah. Many of us are not convinced @Tristan Thomas.
Products have a Description. And they have an SKU that is chosen by the user.
Customers have a Name. They should also have a unique identifier that can be chosen by the user.
@Jonathan Pons you may or may not have thought about using one of your Additional Attributes for the Customer ID. I believe that a poor substitute and it should have its own prominent field.
@Jonathan Pons I do not work for DEAR so I cannot help you beyond suggestions to work around this.
As I've said above - DEAR DOES provide a unique customer ID in the GUID, and it also supplies these GUIDs for each customer address.
Without knowing your workflow I can't be of much help, however the concept of a customer ID that the customer needs to remember seems incredibly outdated to me. Email addresses or phone numbers seem to have taken the place of this concept, and if you search an email address or a phone number in the Sale > Customers / Credits section it will return any/all Customers using this email address. For talking with customers over the phone or in person this seems like a good way of finding their unique Customer.
For integrating systems the GUID works well because, well, it's unique, and machines don't care about the time it takes to send a long string of characters.
We've been using DEAR for a long time now and initially we struggled to use some of our existing processes with the new system, but that's going to the case when you use any new tool whether digital or physical. Over time we've adapted our processes to make the most of DEAR, and from that point of view we've found it to be a pretty good system.
Best of luck and if you have any questions please ask, but remember that I'm not a DEAR employee.