Customer Management

Overview

The Customer area lets you create and review customer accounts. You can also edit customer account information. For instance, if a customer moves, they can call you to update their information in the system.  

Requirements

The following prerequisites will be necessary to accomplish the goals of this article:

• Have access to your Hotcakes store administration

Getting Started

There are no tasks required to proceed with this article.

Customer Management

You can manage customers in your store by selecting the Customers page from the People menu.

 

This page shows a grid of customers.

Column	Description
Avatar	This will either be a placeholder graphic, or the avatar for the customer.  In order for the avatar to show, the customer must have at some point signed up for and used Gravatar.  The avatar is pulled from that service.  When their avatar shows, it makes things a bit more personal for your customer service staff - these customers are real people and not just e-mail addresses.
Name	The customer's first and last name will appear here, provided that the way their user account was added did so in a way that collected their first and last name.  If the first and last name isn't found, you'll see "[no name found"] instead.
E-Mail Address	This will have the e-mail address for the customer, pulled from their user account.
(no name)	You'll see two management icons here.  The first one allows you to edit the customer, or you can click on their avatar to do the same thing.  The second icon will allow you to delete the customer.  Please don't delete the customer unless you really need to.  In most jurisdictions, there are laws around how long you legally must retain customer data, and this is a permanent action.

The customer listing also will identify to you how many customers were found, either on first page load, or as the result of a search.  Below the list is a paging control that will help you navigate through the listing of customers.

If you'd like to add a new customer manually, you can.  Just click the new customer button in the left panel.

Customer Search

You can search for a specific customer using the search control in the left panel.  Simply enter a search term and hit <Enter> to begin searching.

When you complete a search, the search term will be persisted in the search box.  To clear you search, simply remove the search term, and hit <Enter> again.  

The customer search will look through several dimensions of information to find and load into the listing, including: e-mail address, username, first/last name, display name, and profile properties.  Profile properties will include the customer's addresses that they've saved.

Add/Edit a Customer

Whether you choose to add or edit a customer, the view you see is the same.  The only difference will be is that one has information already loaded into it, and a new customer will obviously not have anything already filled in.

When editing a customer profile, you'll see three areas available to edit: the profile, the address book, and their roles.  There are documentation articles available that discuss each of these in more detail.