Siebel Loyalty Administration Guide > Host Organization's Use of Siebel Loyalty >

Merging Loyalty Program Members

You can merge one or more Loyalty member accounts into another member account.

For example, a merge can be useful if someone enrolled in the same Program twice by mistake and accrued points in both memberships. You can use a merge to combine these two memberships into one.

A merge can also be useful if someone enrolled in a Program as a household, but other people from the same household enrolled in the same program as individuals. You can use a merge to combine the household and individual members as a single household member.

During the member merge, there are two kinds of members:

• Surviving Member. The member that survives after the merge. You must select this member last when you do the multi-select before the merge.
• Deactivated Members. The members that do not survive after the merge. These are the members that you do not select last before the merge.

You must follow these guidelines for the merge to be successful:

• All the members must be enrolled in the same program.
• If the surviving member is an individual, then all deactivated members must be individuals.
• If the surviving member is an account or household, then the deactivated members can be of any type.

Results of the Member Merge

This section describes how data from all the records are merged into the surviving record when you perform the merge:

• Points. The system adds up the Available, Lifetime and Qualifying Points of all members, and it gives the total to the surviving member.
• Last Transaction. The system compares the dates when the last transaction was processed for all members, and it uses the latest date as the last transaction of the surviving member.
• Contact Campaigns, Activities, Transactions, Vouchers, Service Requests, Statements, and Membership Cards. The system gives the Contact Campaigns, Activities, Transactions, Vouchers, Service Requests, Statements, and Membership Cards of all the members to the surviving member. The system combines the transaction history of all the members into a single transaction history and combines the service request history of all the members into a single service request history.
• Tiers. The system has the surviving member keep the same tier that it had before the merge. However, the member's tier is recalculated based upon the new combined point total at the next regularly scheduled tier recalculation.
• Tier History. The system gives the combined tier histories of all the members to the surviving member. This means that the tier history will show overlapping tiers in the same tier class for the same date.
• Contact-Level Information. For information stored at the Contact level, such as the Travel Profile:
  • If the same contact was used for all memberships, then the system keeps the surviving member's information.
  • If different contacts were used and these are individual memberships, then the system keeps the surviving member's information.
  • If different contacts were used and these are household or account memberships or an individual membership being merged into an account or household membership, then the system adds all contacts to the surviving membership. The user decides which of these contacts to keep.
• Enrolled Promotions. The enrolled promotions of all members are combined.

Attributes

By default, member merge has the following results for attributes.

If attributes cannot be added together, the system keeps the attribute value from of the surviving member. For example, this applies to attributes with values such as yes/no.

If attributes can be added together, then they are added. For example, this applies to numeric totals.

You can specify how attributes are added by selecting an option in the Merge Action field of the Loyalty Program Administration > Program Level Attributes > Member Attributes view. For example:

• If Sum is selected in the Merge Action field for this member attribute, then the merge sums the values for that attribute for all the members and gives the total to the surviving member. This is useful, for example, if there is a member attribute to store the number of miles traveled by a member and you want the merge to sum the miles given by all the members and give the total to the surviving member.
• If Standard is selected in the Merge Action field, then the merge gives the surviving member the same value that the surviving member had for this attribute before the merge. This setting is useful, for example, when the attribute is text for which an operation such as Sum has no meaning.

The values that are available in the Merge Action field depend on the data type of the attributes, as shown in Table 15.

Changing the Results of the Merge by Setting User Properties

The following results of the merge can be changed by using Siebel Tools to change the user properties for the LOY Member business component:

• Delete Merged Tiers. If this user property is set to Y, the surviving member keeps only the tiers that the surviving member qualified for before the merge. If it is set to N, the surviving member keeps all tiers of all merged members.
• Delete Merged Contacts. If this user property is set to Y, the surviving member keeps only the contacts that the surviving member had before the merge. If it is set to N, the surviving member keeps all contacts of all merged members.
• Delete Non-Qualified Merged Promotions. If this user property is set to Y, the surviving member keeps only the promotions that the surviving member was enrolled in before the merge. If it is set to N, the surviving member keeps all promotions of all merged members.

Performing the Member Merge

Use this procedure to perform the member merge.

To merge a member with another member

1. Navigate to the Loyalty Members screen.
2. In the Members list, multi-select all the records you want to merge, while holding down the Shift key.

   NOTE:  Be sure to select the deactivated members first and the surviving member last. The system merges all the selected records into the last-selected record.

3. In the application-level menu, choose Edit > Merge Records.
4. In the Merge Records confirmation message window, make sure the displayed Member # is that of the intended surviving member, and click OK.

   This adds all the merged members' attributes, points, activities, vouchers, service requests, promotions, and referrals to the survivor member's existing items. In addition, the system empties the merged member records of these items and then deletes it.

   NOTE:  The deactivated member records are deleted.