Admin - Customers

Information on database tracking and customers import/export

How Admin Panel Customer Database works

A Customer database is visible in two separate areas of Now Book It:

1. in the Admin Panel under the Customers Tab, and
2. in the restaurant Diary—under Settings > Customers.

Venue Groups: if you are looking to download your full customer database for marketing purposes (such as importing it to Mailchimp), it is best to use the data contained in the Admin panel (as opposed to the restaurant Diary). This will ensure that all data from the venue group is included, instead of the customer data relating only to a specific venue.

[Please note that this is a read only view and customer records will need to be edited at venue level in the local venue database and will be updated in the Customers Tab]

Below is further information about how the Customer databases work, and the key differences between the Customers tab in the Admin Panel, versus the Customer database located in the restaurant Diary.

Admin Panel Customer Database

When a customer record is imported into the Admin panel's Customers Tab, a new customer record will appear under the Customers Tab. This information will also be pulled in to the venue's Diary view the first time a customer makes a booking via Now Book It.

Once an existing customer from the imported database makes their first booking on the Now Book It system, they become permanently visible in that venue's Diary.
Under the Admin panel's Customers Tab view, the customer's complete record will also show which venues the customer has made bookings at.

The Customer Tab view in the Admin Panel and the restaurant Diary database view, will show all information relating to the customer except booking specific data, namely Bookings (dates and times) Booking notes that are only relevant to that specific venue and Booking.

Customers that have been to more than one venue in the group will display a Diamond Icon against their booking in the Diary, as shown below. This is the only information that you can view regarding the customer's venue specific bookings. Further information regarding a specific booking can be viewed in the restaurant Diary of that venue.

You can search customer profiles in both the Restaurant Diary and Admin Panel databases by entering a mobile number. If you're making a new manual booking, entering the mobile number will pull up that customer's information, and prefill the bookings fields in the Restaurant Diary.

Local Venue Customer Database (located in the Restaurant Diary):

When a customer record is created in the Restaurant Diary (in other words, at a local venue database level), it will also be stored in the Admin Panel > Customers tab. This means that all venues within the group will have access to a customer profile once it is added to the Restaurant Diary.
The diagram below visualises the customer record data flow.

Buttons in the Customers Tab: Filter and Export

There are three buttons in the Admin Panel's Customers Tab.

Admin Panel Customers Tab buttons
These buttons allow you to:

1. Filter your customer profiles.

To do this, click on the first 'filter' button and the following window will open (see below). For a venue group, this is where you can select the account/s that you would like to isolate and view only.

    Admin Panel Customer filters.

1. Download database button. This will open a window that allows the user to download either a single selected database, or all databases if operating in a venue group, as a CSV file.

Admin Panel customer database: download buttons.

      2. Import database button. This can be used to upload customer profiles from other databases or online reservation systems.

To use this function, click on the Import button and the following window will open:

From here you can upload a CSV file into your Now Book account. If you're not sure what this should look like, look at the Template for Import and our Importer How to Guide.