Customer Lifecycle

This standard governs the customer lifecycle in the customer record system: the stages, the health assessment behind them, how stages are recalculated, and how tags and lead sources are used alongside them. It applies to front desk staff, who read stages and set them by hand where the facts require, and to managers, who run recalculation and review its results before applying them. Lifecycle is the system's answer to where a customer stands with the business. The stages are not marketing labels; they are the working vocabulary for win-back, VIP treatment, and knowing who needs a call.

The stages

The stage is suggested from the customer's real behavior: visits, appointments, and expected cycle: as follows

• New lead: zero visits, zero appointments. The person exists: a signup, an abandoned booking, an inquiry: but has not come in. Abandoned-booking captures land here, under Rebooking and Automation.
• New customer: one visit. They are in the door; they have not formed the habit yet. This is the stage where the second booking matters most.
• Active: visited within their expected cycle. The expected cycle comes from their visit history: a customer on a 6-week grooming cycle who came 5 weeks ago is active; at 8 weeks they are drifting.
• Returning: comes back, but outside the expected cycle. Loyal, just irregular.
• Needs attention: health has slipped to needs attention, but the customer is not far past cycle: under 1.5 times the expected gap. The nudge stage.
• At risk: health is at risk: past 1.5 times the expected cycle, with signals stacking: missed documents, expiring vaccinations, unpaid balances, the same signals as the Needs Attention feed in CRM Dashboard.
• Lapsed: was needs attention, now past 1.5 times the cycle. Gone quiet, not gone.
• Lost: was at risk, now past 3 times the expected cycle. Treat as win-back or release.
• VIP: lifetime value of $1,000 or more and 8 visits or more. Both conditions are required. A $1,200 one-time buyer is not VIP; an 8-visit $900 regular is not either. The bar is deliberately high.

Health itself is healthy, needs attention, or at risk, computed with reasons. The scoring returns the reasons list, and a reason such as "documents current" shows that the health assessment looks at document state, not only visit recency.

Recalculating stages

Stages go stale. A new customer from March who now comes every 5 weeks is active, but nothing updates the field until recalculation runs. The recalculation scores every customer in the location's records and applies each suggestion to the lifecycle stage. It has two modes

• Report-only run: scores and reports without writing. The response lists every proposed change as old to new. Staff shall run this first, always. It shows exactly what a live run would do, customer by customer.
• Live run: applies the changes. A suggestion of "keep current stage" is never written, so a live run touches only rows the scoring actually disagrees with.

Run recalculation after any bulk change: an import, a merge cleanup, a period when bookings were not carried over: and on a cadence the manager sets; weekly is reasonable for an active salon. Staff shall not run it mid-day and act on the at-risk list in the same breath. Let the report sit, check the big movers by hand: a VIP dropping to lapsed deserves a human look before the system declares it: then apply.

A stage set by scoring is a suggestion made durable, not a verdict. If staff know something the figures do not: the customer's dog has died, they are traveling for two months, they have moved: set the stage by hand. The scoring will leave a hand-set stage alone on the next run unless the figures disagree again. The scoring suggests; the desk decides.

Tags: the real segmentation

There are no prebuilt segment sets in the system. Segmentation is tags: tags assigned to customers, and tags assigned to pets. The tag list includes VIP, Breeder, Puppy, First Visit, Rescue Partner, Staff, Senior, Referral Partner, Special Handling, Nervous, and High Maintenance.

Tags and stages do different jobs. Stages are computed and temporary: they change as behavior changes. Tags are asserted and stay in place: a person, or an import, put them there, and they stay until a person removes them. "Nervous" on a pet is a tag because no scoring should ever remove it; at risk on the customer is a stage because it must track reality. Use them together: the win-back list is "stage is at risk, no upcoming appointment," a filter on computed state; the handling list is "tag is Special Handling," a filter on asserted state. The directory supports both. Staff shall clear filters when finished, because a forgotten filter is the leading cause of a customer appearing not to be in the system.

Lead sources

Lead sources are: Website, Google, Referral, Social Media, Phone, Walk-In, Campaign, Other. The source is set at creation; the abandoned-booking capture uses Website. This is attribution infrastructure, and it works only if the desk sets it at the first contact. "How did you hear about us" cannot be reconstructed six months later, and marketing spending decisions are made from these records. Ask the question, pick the source, move on.

The funnel view of lifecycle

The booking funnel in CRM Dashboard is the top of the lifecycle: website visit, account created, intake started, intake completed, booking started, booking completed. A lead that never gets past intake started is a different problem: process friction, or price surprise at the service step: from a lead that completes intake but never books, which points to deposit friction or slot availability. Staff shall read the funnel before blaming follow-up for a thin new-lead pipeline; the gap is usually in the flow, not the follow-up.

Controls

• A live recalculation shall never be run before its report-only run has been reviewed.
• A stage shall not be set by hand to flatter the figures. Hand-set stages record a fact the figures cannot see, and the reason shall be noted on the customer record under Notes.
• Tags that record a safety fact, such as Nervous or Special Handling, shall be removed only by a person who has verified the fact no longer applies.

Records

Each customer record carries its lifecycle stage and the health assessment behind it. A recalculation run produces a report listing every change, old to new, before any change is applied. Tag assignments and lead source are kept on the customer and pet records in the customer record system.

Escalation and review

Managers review recalculation reports, hand-set stages, and tag removals. A lifecycle fault that the store cannot resolve shall be reported to support@aapawz.com. Legal process concerning a customer record shall be directed to legal@aapawz.com.