In this article we’ll focus on Customers and Enrollments and their data interactions.
Customer Data
In the Clutch universe as it relates to eCommerce there are three types of customers:
- Members – these are customers who have formally enrolled, or have been auto-enrolled, in your rewards program. Their activity is tracked so that rewards can be issued based on the automated marketing campaigns configured within Clutch. They are also eligible for real-time discounts based on the contents of their checkout. They have a known member ID linked with their online account. Note that some brands choose to “auto-enroll” all customers who buy online.
- Identified Non-Members – these are customers who are not formally enrolled in your rewards program but still have demographic information (sometimes only email address) attached, and have customer accounts created. In the case of eCommerce this is typically any non-enrolled customer identified by their email address. Depending on your implementation and workflow, this may also include “guest checkout” customers. Tracking these customers in Clutch provides the opportunity for a brand to setup automated, personalized marketing campaigns for these non-member customers.
- Anonymous – these are customers who are not identified or assigned a customer account by either the website or Clutch. They have no identifying demographics associated or stored with them. The only information passed to Clutch when an anonymous customer makes a transaction is the transaction information itself. In terms of an eCommerce integration, there will always at least be an email address so in most integrations, there are none of these customers. However, some brands may choose to treat customers who are using guest checkout with this option.
NOTE: with an ecommerce integration, there should be no anonymous transactions. Unlike a customer going into a store and paying cash for an item and leaving, a website customer is always required to provide their email address which can be used ongoing to tie transactions behavior, as well as tie activity to an a loyalty account if that customer should register in the future.
For enrolled members Clutch is able to provide via API valuable information to the website that can be leveraged by the customer rewards account pages. This can include things such balances, rewards, promotional cash and more. All of this valuable information can be used to provide the customer with real-time access to their rewards account.
At a minimum for certification, the following customer and transaction information must be sent to Clutch:
- All member transactions (accompanied by member ID)
- All non-member transactions
You will still call the Clutch APIs to create an account for these customers, however it will not be marked as enrolled. (This is called “allocating” a card/account.)
Creating Accounts: Allocation & Enrollment
Allocation is the act of generating a Clutch account (card) for a customer, which will be used to identify ongoing activity for that person. A customer that is associated with an account/card can be either “Identified” (we know who they are and have some demographic info associated with their account) or “Enrolled”. When allocating via API for this customer, you will set the isEnrollment flag to either True or False depending on the customer’s enrollment opt-in preference or the Brand’s business decision as to whether or not all known customers should be “auto-enrolled” or not.
Enrollment is the act of formally signing up and opting-in a customer for your rewards program. This can be done by allocating a card/account first and then using the UpdateAccount API call to set enrollment to true. The updateAccount call will also be used to send the member’s demographic and preference choices to Clutch as well. The brand will need a page (usually in the my account section of their site) to provide Loyalty program terms and conditions to their consumers.
More information can be found in our API documentation site for allocation and updateAccount for loyalty enrollments.
For certification, the following requirement should be met:
Any new ecommerce customer record (loyalty members and non-members) should have a Clutch ID associated and stored on their account.
Enrollment
There are a variety of ways to handle enrolling customers. Brand preferences on this topic can vary widely. It is our requirement that your integration be built with enough flexibility to handle the following methods at minimum.
- Ecommerce site is the only enrollment source possible
- A brand may have more than one channel by which a customer would be able to enroll (Examples: Retail/Restaurant, Online, Mobile). In this case, it is possible that a retail shopper has enrolled in-store and usually shops in-store, but then wants to spend a reward and earn more points via Ecommerce. Upon Ecommerce (storefront) account creation, it will be necessary to first search for this customer prior to creating a new card/account within Clutch’s platform in order to avoid duplication.
- Does the merchant want to enable auto or standard (manual) enrollment?
If your merchant falls into the first scenario, online only, enrollment can be a bit simpler because there is a lower chance that the customer already has a Clutch account, however, for certification we still require that you first search for a Clutch account prior to allocating and enrolling a new account. In the online only scenario this search would be done with the email address of the new customer.
In the second scenario, the flow is the same, but you will need to consider what the customer field you plan to search on. For example, if the in-store enrollment requires phone number but not email, you would perform your customer search on phone number. If the flow in store is such that a physical card with a card number is being provided and no other demographic information is being asked for, you may need to provide an option for a customer to add their existing account by membership number.
Standard and Auto Enrollment
The 2 methods of that may be used at the discretion of the merchant are:
- Standard (or Manual) Enrollment
- Auto-Enrollment
With Standard Enrollment each customer explicitly chooses to be enrolled. This is typically provided through an opt-in during checkout as well as a stand-alone program opt-in.
With Auto-Enrollment, the the brand specifies that by creating an Ecommerce account, the consumer should be enrolled into the Loyalty program. At this time, an email (powered by Clutch or the Ecommerce platform) is typically sent to the customer welcoming them to the program and providing them with relevant information including account number (if applicable), and instructions on how to identify themselves at future checkouts (both in-store and online).
- For a certified integration, your eCommerce site should support both options (standard and auto) of enrollment.
- Your integration should include the ability to do a stand alone enrollment as well as enrolling during the checkout flow.
Your integration should support environments where other enrollment channels are in play.
Enrollment Flow – must provide the proper unique identifying element to be searched (phone, email, etc.). Loyalty cardSetId should be specified for search.
