Anonymous Customer Filter

Table of Contents

1. Overview
2. How SoundCommerce Manages Anonymous Customers
3. Criteria to Identify Anonymous Customers
4. Default Identification Logic
5. Anonymous Customer Identification & Labeling
6. Excluding Anonymous Customers from Aggregations
7. Query Builder & Direct Access

Overview

There are customers for whom we have not received sufficient data to successfully match against existing customer records (i.e. these customers will always appear as first-time purchasers). SoundCommerce provides the ability to filter anonymous customers in or out, depending on your business use case. In order to make the best use of this filter, we have provided some background on anonymous customers.

How SoundCommerce Manages Anonymous Customers

1. SoundCommerce identifies anonymous customers (i.e. which cuids should be labeled “Anonymous” to be excluded from certain reports and queries). This involves two core components:
1. Identify who anonymous customers are
2. Label these customers as anonymous
2. SoundCommerce identifies reports and queries that should exclude anonymous customers to preserve accuracy. This involves two core components:
1. Identify reports and queries that should exclude anonymous customers
2. Accurately remove anonymous customers without causing confusion or other data validity problems

Criteria to Identify Anonymous Customers

Prior to defining steps around identification, we need to define criteria to label a customer as anonymous:

Anonymous Customer Definition: Any customer record (cuid) identified from an in-store or point-of-sale system transaction for whom we lack enough data to determine if that customer has placed an order before the current transaction.

Default Identification Logic

The following logic should be employed to determine if a customer is anonymous.

1. Is it a POS or in-store transaction? (identified by the channel field)
2. Has the customer placed other orders in the past?
3. Does the customer have an email address? 

Anonymous Customer Identification & Labeling

1. Labeling Anonymous Customers: We added a new boolean field to the Customer data model entitled “Anonymous”. This will populate “Yes” for customers who meet the criteria outlined above, and “No” for customers who do not. 

Excluding Anonymous Customers from Aggregations

1. Dashboards: Customers who have been labeled “Anonymous” will be excluded from the following Dashboard views. “Anonymous” is a filter that is accessible to Dashboard users, and the SoundCommerce default state is to remove anonymous customers. 

Query Builder & Direct Access

The “Anonymous” field is accessible In Query Builder so that users can intentionally include or exclude these customers from query results. The following queries and use cases are examples where users will likely want to exclude anonymous customers from results (this applies to aggregated results that stem from these queries (e.g. CHS of all customers whose first purchase was through an online store))

1. Cohort Queries: Return a specific cohort (customers who placed their first order on a specific date or within a specific range)
2. First Channel Order: Return a list of customers who placed their first order through a specific sales or marketing channel
3. First Order Product or Category: Return a list of customers whose first purchase included a specific SKU or category