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Edit a Customer Record

The Edit control on the Customer panel opens five things, not four: contact information, addresses, marketing consent across three channels, tax details, and adding the customer to a company. This walks each dialog, what it asks for, which fields are required, and which of them the store acts on without asking you again.

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Almost everything the customer told you about themselves is changed from one place: the Edit control on the Customer panel of their detail page. It opens a short menu, and each entry opens a dialog over the page.

These fields matter more than most of the record because the store acts on them without asking again. The email is where every receipt goes, the default address is what gets printed on a label, the consent lines decide who a campaign is allowed to reach, and the tax setting decides what the customer is charged. A stale value here does not just sit on the record. It goes out on the next order.

Editing Customer Information maps the rest of the record, including everything this menu does not reach.

Before you begin

  • Your role includes Edit customers. The roles screen also lists Edit customer details, Manage customer addresses and Manage customer subscriptions separately, so a role can be set up to open some of these forms and not others.
  • For an email change, you have confirmed the new address with the customer, since it is both their sign-in and where their order emails go.
  • Go to Customers and open the customer.

Where the control is

A customer's page in the admin. (1) the Customer panel in the right-hand column, holding Contact information and the Edit control at its top right, above the Notes card (opens full size)

Edit sits at the top right of the Customer panel (1), the first card in the right-hand column. The card itself only reports. Contact information, the default address, the marketing lines and the tax details are all shown there, and all of them are changed through this menu. Show more at the foot of the card opens the ones it keeps folded away.

Menu entry What it opens
Edit contact information Name, language, email and phone
Manage addresses Every address on the record, and which one is the default
Edit marketing settings The three marketing consents
Edit tax details Whether tax is collected, and any exemptions
Add to company Attaching the customer to a company and its locations

Four of the five change what the customer told you about themselves. The fifth, Add to company, is a decision of yours rather than a fact of theirs, and it is the entry people do not think to look for in this menu.

Steps

1. Open the form you need

Select Edit at the top right of the Customer panel and choose one of the five. Each opens a dialog over the page with Cancel on it, and the page itself stays where it was behind the dialog.

Pick by what you are changing rather than by where you saw it on the card. Tax status, for instance, is reported under Tax details on the panel but changed through this menu.

2. Contact information

The Contact Information dialog. Under the line Basic contact information for this customer are First name and Last name, both marked required, a Language dropdown reading English Default with the note that the customer will receive notifications in this language, a required Email, and a Phone number with a country selector reading United States +1 beside the number itself, blurred here. Cancel and Save sit at the foot (opens full size)

First name, Last name and Email carry a red asterisk, which is how the dialog marks a field it needs. Phone number has a country selector beside it. Language decides which language the customer's notifications are written in, as the line under the field says.

The email is the field to be careful with, because it is both the customer's sign-in and the address their order emails go to. Change it to an address the customer has not confirmed and their next order confirmation goes somewhere they cannot read it, with nothing on the record to show that anything is wrong.

3. Addresses

Manage addresses lists every address the customer has, each showing the name, any company, the street, the town and postcode, the country and a phone number. One of them carries a Default badge. Each row has its own Edit control, Add new address at the foot adds another, and there is no Save button at all, since the editing happens row by row rather than across the dialog.

The badged one is the address the Customer panel shows as the default, so on a record with several it is the one worth keeping current. The others stay on the record and nothing is lost by leaving them there.

The Edit marketing status dialog. Under the line asking which marketing channels the customer has agreed to receive messages from are three rows: Email, marked Subscribed, with the customer's address and a toggle switched on; SMS, marked Subscribed, with their number blurred here and a toggle switched on; and WhatsApp, marked Not subscribed, with the same blurred number and a toggle switched off. Cancel and Save sit at the foot (opens full size)

There are three channels here, not two: Email, SMS and WhatsApp. Each has its own toggle, reads Subscribed or Not subscribed, and shows the address or number it would use, so you can see at a glance that the customer in the picture takes email and SMS but not WhatsApp.

Consent is recorded per channel because that is how it is given. Someone who agreed to order updates by email has not thereby agreed to messages on WhatsApp, and this dialog is the store's record of which they actually said yes to. Turning a channel on without that agreement makes the record say the customer agreed to something they did not.

5. Tax details

Edit tax details opens a Tax settings section holding a dropdown that reads Collect tax unless exemptions apply, and under it a required Select exemptions field with a search box.

The wording is worth reading twice. The dropdown is the setting rather than a description of the customer: tax is collected unless an exemption is added, so the exemption is the thing you add rather than something you switch off. The result then appears on the card, under Tax details, which on the customer in these pictures reads Tax exempt (pending).

6. Add to company

Add to company opens a list of the store's companies, each with the number of locations it has, over a search field and an Add new company control. The dialog says it will add the customer to a company and give them access to one or more of its locations.

This is the B2B side of the record, and it changes what the customer can do at checkout rather than any of their details. Manage a Company covers what a company is and what being attached to one gives them.

Whichever form you used, the Customer panel is where the value is displayed afterwards, so that is where to check it. If it still reads the old one, the change did not go through, and an empty required field is the first thing to look for.

If something goes wrong

  • Save does nothing and the dialog stays open. Look for a field marked with a red asterisk and left empty. The contact form marks first name, last name and email; the tax form marks the exemption.
  • The panel still shows the old value. The change did not save. Reopen the form and look for a field the dialog is rejecting.
  • You cannot find where to change tags or notes. Neither is in this menu. The rest of the record is mapped in Editing Customer Information.
  • Nothing in the menu saves at all. Your role may lack Edit customers, or the narrower permission behind that one form.

Next steps

Still stuck?

More in Customers

  • Customer Segments

    A segment is a saved question about your customers rather than a saved list, so its members change as they do. Tanqory gives you two ways to write that question, a query builder and a form of Field, Operator and Value filters, and this article covers both, plus the panel that starts closed, the AI Refine field and what to do when it answers with nothing, the forty-nine fields you can filter on, and everything the row menu lets you do to a segment afterwards.

  • Adding a Customer

    Creating a customer record by hand, from the Add Customer button to the saved record. Three fields are required and everything else can wait, the three marketing consents start unticked and are a record of what the customer agreed to rather than a way to opt them in, and the Save bar is on the form from the moment it opens.

  • Search the Customer List

    Finding one customer and finding a group are different jobs with different tools. The search box matches name, email and phone and nothing else, it searches inside the tab you are standing on rather than the whole store, and the thing people most often type into it, a tag, comes back as No customers found rather than as an error.

  • Customer Tags

    A tag gives a group of customers a name so it is already assembled when you need it. This article covers where tags are set, one record at a time or in bulk from the list, what a tag is actually good for once it exists, and the one thing it will not do, which is answer the search box.

All 49 articles in Customers

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