Product: Nexternal

Article Link: http://help.truecommerce.com/en/articles/4562151-nexternal-learn-about-customer-types-and-customer-type-history-tracking

Customer Types (Customers / Types -blue button at the top) are the basis upon which merchants can provide customers with customized and varied shopping experiences in the Nexternal online store. For example, you may regulate visibility of products and/or categories by customer type, pricing, shipping rates, sales tax applicability and billing options by customer type, and even layout design by customer type, to name a few of the modifiable experiences and data points which can be differentiated by customer type.

For a complete tour of the Customer Types section and the nuances relating to customer types, we recommend that you take the Guided Tutorial called "Learn about Customer Types & Ranks in Nexternal". (Guided Tutorials are accessed separately from the Support Center in Foundry, through the link to Guided Tutorials in the system navigation. In the legacy standalone version of Nexternal they can be accessed through the Guided Tutorials link in the left navigation.)

Further, Nexternal automatically maintains a log of customer type changes in the database, allowing you to track and see when customers joined and terminated association with each of your customer types. This is particularly useful for merchants managing club memberships in the system. We recommend that all merchants who use customer types to deliver experiential differentiation, turn on the display of customer type history tracking, which will display the date and details of each customer type change on the customer record.

To turn on this display we recommend that you take the Guided tutorial called "Display Customer Type History Tracking", which will guide you through activating and viewing the display. (Guided Tutorials are accessed separately from the Support Center in Foundry, through the link to Guided Tutorials in the system navigation. In the legacy standalone version of Nexternal they can be accessed through the Guided Tutorials link in the left navigation.)

Note that because this tracking was enabled in October of 2018, previous historical tracking is not known through this mechanism. However, if you maintained this record manually, such as via a custom field, a CUSTOMER_TYPE_SET_DATE has also been added to the Customer Import (Customers / Import) allowing you to import customer type join dates prior to Nexternal's addition of this tracking feature.

rev: 1/6/21