Problem: In CP SQL, we want to start tracking customer birthday’s for use in sending out birthday coupons, or emailing discount offers. However, when trying to use a date profile field we have encountered (2) two issues as follows:
Issue #1: The date profile field requires the year. For personal security and vanity reasons, many of our customers refuse to provide the year or the date altogether. This is OK, we do not need to know the year. The rest of the information is critical to our marketing efforts, though. How can we get around this issue?
Resolution to Issue #1: CP SQL’s Data Dictionary can be modified to create a prompt along with a default masking.
An example of this is: Field name is changed to "Birthday" with a default data value of "MM-DD"
This allows the user to type in any combination of characters. The default prompt when adding new customers will be "MM-DD", which the users can over type it.
So "MM-DD" might become 05-07 (i.e. May 7th)
These values should have consistent input through all of your customers to make data-mining activities more accurate and complete.
Issue #2: We’ve tried to implement resolution #1 above, but we find that our users are by-passing the new "Birthday" field when adding new customers.
Resolution to Issue #2: The Data Dictionary can be changed to make the birthday field a required field, and the default data value can be removed.
Example: Field display name is changed from "Birthday" to "Birthday(MM-DD)". With no default data in the data field, users must put something in it in order to save the customer record.
Contact the CCS Retail Systems Support Department for assistance with implementing the above type or similar types of Database customizations..