In late 2018 a client of ours took it upon themselves to export their customer list, clean up the data, and prep it for re-upload. This is possible, but their starting point (the list they exported) was incorrect and many hours of work getting a list of several thousand customers went to waste. That prompted me to write this article.
If you would like to clean up your customer data or make adjustments to their Group designations, you have to export the correct list. Otherwise, your work/time may not be in the proper format for re-upload.
**Very Important**—Contact us first before you plan to start any export to update customer data. It is just best to connect and assess your goals.
The three most common customer data clean up processes involve Groups, Shipping Addresses, and Billing Addresses.
Let’s start with Billing and Shipping addresses
Many customers have multiple shipping addresses and credit cards saved in their account. To keep track of that, Figure applies each of those address entries with its own reference id. To see this, visit the Your Data is Your Data page, a link can be found at the bottom of any page in your Figure account.
Once there, in the left column you can export “All Customer Shipping Addresses” or “All Customer Billing Addresses”. In those exports, you will see columns for “customer_id” and just “id”.
“customer_id” is the overall unique id for that customer account
“id” is the reference for each individual shipping address or billing address within that account
Therefore, if you wanted to update shipping or billing addresses in a spreadsheet and then re-upload those new details in bulk, those two columns will be needed to reference both the customer and the addresses to be updated.
**Very Important**—If you perform a regular Customer data export (found on the main Customers page, in the drop down menu Export button) that will not provide all the columns needed to successfully re-upload all the details you plan to update in the customer addresses.
Updating Group designations
If you have multiple tiered Groups that receive unique allocations both in quantity and SKUs, there may be a time when you need to update the customers within those groups. Over time, some customers will decrease their buying, while others may stay loyal release after release.
We have an article available to guide you through that process titled - Bulk shifting clients from one group to another.