Customer tags

Tags are labels you put on customers by hand — student, regular, staff, press — so you can find them again. Set them up on Customers → Customer tags, then pick one from the All tags dropdown on Customers or Loyalty → Members to see just those people. Because everyone picks from the same list, "VIP" and "vip" never split your regulars into two groups.

Tag a lot of customers at once

On Customers (or Loyalty › Members), tick the people you want, then press Add tag in the bar at the bottom and pick a customer tag. Your ticks stay while you search, so you can find and tick people one search at a time. Remove tag in the same bar takes a tag off everyone ticked. See Customers.

Tags that move someone up a loyalty level

With the newer loyalty features switched on, a loyalty level can use a customer tag as a way in — for example, anyone tagged Local is on Silver. That tag is then managers only: only the owner or a manager can add it to a customer or take it off, including from the bar at the bottom of Customers, and we keep a record of who did it each time. Anyone else is told so and nothing changes. The tag list shows which tags these are. Set it up on the level's page under Loyalty › Tiers; see Loyalty.

Customer tags and visit tags

When you add a tag you choose which of the two it is, and it matters:

• Customer tag — stays on the person and shows on every future booking. Use it for things that are true next time too: regular, press, shareholder.
• Visit tag — applies to one booking only. Use it for things about that evening: birthday, window seat, anniversary.

Putting a visit tag on a booking

Open the booking in the diary, and on the Visit tags row (on the booking's side of the panel, under the table and deposit) press Add tag. Pick from your visit-tag list; the tag shows on that booking straight away, and in the Tags column on the parties list. Press the × on a chip to take it off again.

Only visit tags are offered here. Customer tags are a separate picker, under the guest's name on the other side of the panel — see below.

Putting a guest tag on the person, from the diary

You no longer have to open the customer record to do this. Open the booking in the diary: the guest's tags show as chips right under their name. Press Add tag beside them and pick from your guest-tag list.

The tag goes on the person, not on that evening — so it's there the next time they book, and on every booking after that. Press the × on a chip to take it off again. You can still do the same thing from the customer's record if you prefer.

If the booking isn't matched to anyone in your customer list, there are no tag chips and no Add tag under the name — there's no record to attach the tag to yet.

Where a guest tag shows up on the day

Open a booking in the diary and press View customer profile, at the bottom of the guest's side of the panel. Customer tags for that person appear there under Customer tags, alongside their visits, spend, preferred dishes and how many bookings they've kept, cancelled and no-showed — so whoever is on the door sees what your manager wrote about them without leaving the booking.

If you want the same word at both levels, add it twice. It's worth being clear which you mean — "VIP" as a description of a person and "VIP" as a description of one table are different things to your floor team.

Sending one tag to the kitchen

Tags stay off kitchen tickets unless you say otherwise. If one of them is something the kitchen can act on, open that tag and tick Show on kitchen ticket. From then on it prints on every kitchen ticket for a guest who has it, and the tag shows an On kitchen ticket label in your list so you can see at a glance which ones are going to the pass.

It's set one tag at a time, and it's off to start with. That's deliberate: a kitchen ticket is read in a hurry, and a seating note sitting next to an allergy warning is how the allergy warning stops being read.

Allergies and dietary needs don't go here

A tag is not a safety alert, even one you've sent to the kitchen. Add allergies and dietary requirements as a custom field marked Safety alert instead — those show on the kitchen ticket, the till's table banner and the bookings diary, and only those are checked against what the guest orders. See Allergen and occasion fields.

There's a real difference behind that rule. A safety alert is something the guest told you when they booked. A tag is something a member of your team wrote down. For an allergy, that difference matters — both for the kitchen and for your obligations around health information — so the two are kept apart on purpose. If you type something that looks like an allergy into a tag, the portal will point you at the right place.

Sending tags to your marketing CRM

Each tag has its own Send to my marketing CRM switch, and it's off until you turn it on. Nothing goes to HubSpot or Salesforce unless you choose it for that specific tag. It's per tag rather than all-or-nothing because most venues have a few tags they'd happily segment a mailing list on, and a few they'd never want leaving the building.

Once a tag has gone to your CRM you can't un-send it, so it's worth a moment's thought before switching one on.

Archiving a tag

You can't delete a tag, only archive it. Archived tags stop being offered when your team is tagging someone, but stay on the guests and bookings that already have them — so last month's records still read the way they did at the time. Restore it any time from the Archived section at the bottom of the page.

The tag's key is fixed once it's created, for the same reason: changing it would disconnect every guest already carrying that tag.

Who can see this

Customer tags needs the CRM feature switched on. If you can't see it in the sidebar under Customers, that's why — ask us and we'll turn it on.