If you are switching to Lightspeed Loyalty from your previous rewards program, it is possible to import your customers and their existing point balances into Lightspeed Loyalty, provided your previous rewards system has the ability to export its data. If it does, you can modify the resulting spreadsheet to align with Lightspeed Loyalty and our Support team can generate those entries for you. 

Before you begin

There are some limitations to the import process, and as such, there are a few things you should do before sending us your file for importing. 

The most important limitation is that we can only import data into Lightspeed Loyalty once. Once your import sheet has been submitted, you will not be able to submit additional spreadsheets with new customers.

We therefore recommend that you choose a cutoff date after which you will no longer use your old rewards system. This will mean there will be a short period between the exporting of your data from your previous rewards system and the importing of the data into Lightspeed Loyalty during which you will not be awarding points. 

Some other limitations to consider:

• Additional customers cannot be imported at a later time, so make sure to send us your entire database at once. New customers will be enrolled through Lightspeed Retail.
• You cannot manually add customers to Lightspeed Loyalty while your import is in progress.
• We cannot import negative point balances, so please ensure that all point balances on your spreadsheet are positive values (or 0).
• Every customer must have at least 1 unique identifier, either an email address or a phone number. A customer can have both an email address and a phone number, but cannot have an empty cell for both. Since these identifiers must be unique, two customers cannot share an email address or a phone number. If more than one customer has the same email or phone, you must either merge them or retain only the higher point value.
• We cannot modify existing customers, so the import is best done before you've entered any customers into Lightspeed Loyalty.
• We cannot attach a customer to a customer group during import. Once the import is complete, you can create customer groups and add customers to those groups through the Loyalty Dashboard.
• Imported customers do not receive sign-up bonuses. If you award a certain number of points as a bonus for signing up and want imported customers to receive that bonus, you'll need to add the appropriate number of points to their balance on your import spreadsheet before submitting it.

The import generally takes 2-3 business days to be completed and you will be notified as soon as it is done. An improperly formatted spreadsheet can delay that processing time however, so it's important to make sure your spreadsheet columns align with Lightspeed Loyalty.

Creating your import spreadsheet

Once you've exported your data from your previous rewards system, you should have a spreadsheet containing all of your customers and their points balance. You'll need to edit the names of the columns on that spreadsheet to match the data fields Lightspeed Loyalty is expecting. Your columns should look like this after editing:

These columns represent:

• Email: the customer's email address. This must be unique.
• CountryCode: the customer's country code for international calling (for example, 1 for the United States and Canada, 44 for the United Kingdom, 31 for the Netherlands, 33 for France, etc).
• Phone: the customer's phone number. This must be unique (no spaces or dashes).
• FirstName: the customer's first name.
• LastName: the customer's last name.
• Points: the customer's reward point balance at the moment you stopped using your old rewards system.
• EmailMarketingOptIn: a Yes or No flag for whether or not the customer has consented to receiving marketing emails.

If you exported data has any other columns that are not represented above, you can delete them as Lightspeed Loyalty will not support that data.

Once your import is complete

Once your customers have been imported into Lightspeed Loyalty, you can freely enroll new customers and resume awarding points. To ensure that the point balances you've just imported have the same value as the points awarded through Lightspeed Loyalty, be sure to adjust your campaigns to award Loyalty points at the same rate as your previous rewards system.