Customers and points

A record for the people who come back, points earned on the clock and spent on free table time, and the three messages CoinOp sends on your behalf.

Can a pool hall run a loyalty scheme on its till?

Yes. Anybody can be a member — there is no card and nothing to sign up for. A customer earns one point for every minute they play, and spends those points on free table time at checkout. The venue sets how many points buy a free minute, and whether points expire.

A person, not an account

A customer in CoinOp is a name, usually a phone number, and whatever the venue has learned about them. There is no sign-up, no card and no app: staff add somebody at the counter in the ten seconds it takes to check them in, and everything after that follows on its own.

The customer list in Settings, showing names, phone numbers, tiers and points balances — Everyone the venue knows, with what they have earned beside them. A balance of nothing is a dash rather than a zero — most of a directory has never played, and a column of zeros reads as data.

Settings → Customers

The memo

A line staff see the moment somebody is seated: always pays card, prefers table 4, banned from the darts. It is the thing a venue normally keeps in one person’s head and loses when they are off.

Attaching somebody to a table

The customer field on the check-in window searches as you type, by name or by phone number. Pick them and the session is theirs; if they are not on the list yet, Add new customer is on the same window and takes a name and a number.

Tap a free table on the floor.
Start typing a name or a phone number in the customer box.
Pick them from the list, or add them.
Check in. The clock starts and so do the points.

A name typed into the check-in window finds somebody the venue already knows.

A table can be checked in without a customer, and most are. Nothing here is compulsory — a walk-in who wants a table and no conversation gets one.

Points

One point for every minute played. That is fixed, because a scheme whose earn rate moves is one no customer can keep track of and no member of staff can explain across a counter.

What the venue sets is the other half: how many points buy a free minute. Three means three hours played buys an hour back. One means an hour played buys an hour, which is a regular eventually playing half the night on the house; four is a nudge rather than a reward.

The points settings, showing the earn rate, what a point buys, and the expiry window — The one dial, and the sentence it produces — written the way a customer would be told it, so whoever sets it can see what they have just promised.

Settings → Customers → Points

What is earned, and when

Points are earned against the clock, not against the till: they come from minutes played, and they land when the session is paid for. Food, drinks and shop items earn nothing, whoever is attached to the sale. An hour is sixty points whether they ate or not.

Paused time earns nothing, because the meter was not running. A table with three people checked in separately earns each of them their own minutes, which is what makes a group bill come out right — the bill itself belongs to nobody, and each player’s points are their own.

Spending them

At the till, a sale with table time on it and a customer on that table shows a ★ Points button. It offers the free minutes their balance will cover, takes the money off the bill and the points off the balance in one step.

Points come off the amount above the table’s minimum charge, so a venue that charges a minimum still collects it — unless it says otherwise in the same settings. Refund the sale and the points go back.

Her points come off the table time, and off her balance, in one press.

One customer’s record: visits, what they have spent, their points balance and where each point came from — A customer’s own record says where every point came from and where it went. Somebody who asks why their balance fell can be told.

Expiry

Off by default. Set a window and points lapse that many months after they were earned — oldest first, so spending always uses up the points closest to expiring. Nothing expires silently: see the messages below.

Tiers

A tier is a standing discount for a group of people — a student rate, a members’ rate, a staff rate. It applies to their table time automatically and is separate from points: tiers change the price, points buy minutes.

Putting somebody in a tier is giving money away every time they play, so it asks for an owner’s PIN even where correcting their phone number does not.

The three messages

CoinOp will send a customer a WhatsApp message on three occasions, and each is switched on separately. All three go only to people who said they were happy to be contacted.

A birthday. On the morning of it, once a year.
Points about to lapse. Before they do, not after — a message telling somebody what they have lost is worse than none.
Somebody who has stopped coming. A regular who has not been in for a while, once.

Each is sent once and recorded, so a till restarted three times in a morning does not send three birthday messages. They go out through the same WhatsApp connection as the waiting list — see The waiting list.

Settings → Customers → Messages

Gaming accounts

A CoinOp customer and a ggLeap account are different things, and a person can have one and not the other. They can be linked on the customer’s record, and a venue moving over can import its ggLeap directory in one go — see Gaming PCs.