Alpine IQ performs merges to avoid customers having duplicate loyalty wallets, missing points, and to get accurate historical data for actionable use cases in marketing/ analytics. i.e: if you only have a small view of the customers history, you will not have accurate avg. basket values, lifecycle stages, favorite products, etc. The entire customer journey requires cleansed data to maximize revenue and build a quality customer relationship. You have maximimum control over how you wish for your data to be merged and synced but by default Alpine IQ uses our battle tested process across over 1200+ retail ops and over 50+ cannabis specific integrations controlling 191,903,881 cannabis customer records as of 9/3/21.
Merging is only as powerful as your data. If your staff is putting in fake data, your merging is going to be very difficult to resolve. It is impossible for Alpine IQ to know every possible fake data entry but we do automatically define possible fakes after we notice a high percentile of non-matching users leveraging the same email/ phone etc. i.e: Staff asks for customers phone but to save time they enter 888-888-8888 or email as no@gmail.com/ 1234@gmail.com etc. Please train employees to NOT do this. If the customer does not want to give you information, do not put in fake data.
For referece, Alpine only uses deterministic matching to merge customers. We cannot due to compliance, merge customers with shared attributes such as birthday or name (Probabilistic). The most common merges happen do to matches on the following user data:
Please see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_linkage#Methods for a detailed review of widely accepted practices for record linkage.
You can modify a merge a few ways:
If you alter an unwanted merge, you should expect that the actions taken by the member that you are un-merging to also be removed from the other users it was merged with. This can cause points to spike (because redemptions increase or for points to be taken away because the un-merged user had transactions that you didn't want to belong to the previously rolled up contact.
There are a number of situations in which dirty-data can cause unwanted merges, and in turn cause spikes or severe dips in a persona's points balances when unmerged. Some edge case scenarios below: - John Doe is merged with Jill Smith due to a matching phone number in their POS system. In AlpineIQ, their sales and points have also been merged together. John has been redeeming discounts and using points for the combined persona. A budtender then realizes that Jill's phone number is incorrect in the POS and goes in to correct it. This would cause John and Jill to un-merge and have 2 separate profiles. Given that John has already been redeeming discounts and points all this time, and he no longer has Jill's sales being included in his persona, his point balance falls to 0 (because he now only has redemptions under his persona and none of Jill's sales accruing him points). Jill, on the other hand, would see a significant spike in her points because the redemptions John made in their merged persona are no longer present, but the sales (and the point accruals are). - Ben Smith is a loyalty member with a phone 123-123-1234. He has spent $500, has 500 points, and has just made a discount redemption for 100 points. His balance is currently 400 points. An existing customer named Amy shows up in store. She has $1000 worth of purchases and thus 1000 points. The budtender decides to update her phone to 123-123-1234 in the POS. This causes her profile to now merge with Ben's because he also has the same phone. Ben's balance updates to 1400 points because Amy's orders are now merged with Ben's.
Take aways: