Square Customer Directory

While Customer Directory lacks the complex sales pipeline of enterprise CRMs, it excels as a simple customer management hub for small to mid-sized businesses already running on Square.

Its core features include:

Automatic Customer Profiles

Every time you complete a sale, Square instantly creates or updates a customer profile in the Directory. Each profile accumulates the customer’s contact info and full purchase history across sales channels without any manual data entry. This ensures that your database builds itself effortlessly, capturing valuable details like what each customer bought and when.

You can search profiles by name, phone, email, or custom fields, and add notes or feedback to a customer’s record.

Seamless Square Ecosystem Integration

Directory works natively with other Square products. It feeds into Square Marketing for email/newsletter campaigns and into Square Loyalty for tracking and rewarding repeat customers. You can also use Square Messages to send texts to customers from their profile.

Customer Segmentation & Smart Lists

Square lets you filter and group customers based on their behavior. The system provides ready-made “Smart Groups” (e.g., lapsed customers or frequent visitors) and allows you to add custom tags. This helps you target your outreach and marketing campaigns, like identifying top spenders for a VIP sale.

Card on File for Payments

Square’s ability to save a customer’s payment card on file (with their permission) is great for businesses that charge recurring payments without needing to ask for card information again. The card on file is encrypted and tied to the customer’s profile.

Accessibility (Cloud & Mobile)

Square’s Customer Directory is cloud-based. You can access it via any web browser in the Square Dashboard, and it’s integrated into the Square POS app on iOS/Android. There’s no separate software to install, which means that if you’re logged into your Square account, the CRM is already there. This means you can check a customer’s info or add a note, whether you’re on a desktop or using the Square mobile app on the go.

Customer Directory’s interface is clean, modern, and extremely intuitive, especially for anyone already familiar with Square’s Dashboard. Existing Square sellers will find the Directory seamlessly embedded in the menu, and there’s almost no separate CRM system to learn.

The learning curve is minimal, and most users can navigate and utilize basic features with little to no training.

Onboarding is straightforward as well. As soon as you start taking sales, the CRM begins populating itself. The process of merging duplicate contacts or editing a customer’s info is guided with in-app tools and a helpful knowledge base if needed.

Overall, Square’s CRM feels like a natural extension of the POS, designed so that even non-technical business owners can make sense of their customer data quickly.

Contact management in Square Customer Directory is largely automated. Every customer who makes a purchase can be automatically added (if identifiable by card, email, or phone entry at checkout), creating a rich profile without the user doing anything.

Each profile consolidates the customer’s contact info, every transaction they’ve made at your business, any feedback they’ve given, and notes left by your staff. This gives you a 360° view of an existing customer’s interactions.

However, Square Directory doesn’t focus on lead management and new customer acquisition. You won’t find visual Kanban boards of leads moving through stages. The system is best suited for managing existing customers and repeat business, rather than tracking cold leads or complex sales processes (B2B).

From the Dashboard, you can view metrics like customer visit frequency, average customer spend, total number of customers, and even each customer’s lifetime value to your business. These reports help identify trends (like how often your regulars visit or which segment spends the most).

Reports, though, are not highly customizable, and you can’t build very granular custom CRM reports. But the data is still actionable for a small business owner planning marketing.

For third-party integrations, there’s the Square App Marketplace, where there are hundreds of apps that can sync with Customer Directory. For instance, you can connect Mailchimp, GoDaddy, QuickBooks, and WooCommerce through built-in apps or Zapier-style middleware.

However, non-native integrations are not as seamless as native ones. Some external integrations may require additional setup or fees, and data might not sync in real-time. Square provides open APIs as well, so developers can build custom integrations if needed.