Thank you Kamutula! I appreciate your feedback. You have provided another key example of a simple but important piece of information that when addressed can make a huge difference. In the case of the phone number, based on what you can afford, you may consider automatically populating the area code based on the country/city selection. Forcing a format for the phone number entry. Putting a checkbox for customers who are willing to say that they are transitory so that entering the phone number becomes optional. And a simpler approach may be to teach the reps the importance of collecting the phone number so that better care is taken in collecting it. Even considering the noise and configuration at the point of sale area to allow easier conversation.

The challenge with data collection was not so much with the email address, but rather the customer’s phone number. It was vital to capture the contact phone number on specific products like printers etc because you needed to contact them back to up-sell them on consumables like ink cartridges, toners etc.

But also, by capturing the phone number, a specially trained team can then contact them to carefully extract even more definitive data for marketing and CRM. Therefore, collecting accurate phone number was very critical.

But the phone number has a series of possible permutations when a customer shouts it out across a Point of Sale: do you include a country code, an STD code, is it a mobile phone number or a land line etc. What if the customer is just passing through town from another region, another country even… This information when collected by shop-floor, customer-facing, check-out operators ( who may even be casual employees ), used to descend into a Cinderella of data management fairy-tale.