I know this comes up a lot, but just wondering what people are doing to reduce duplicate account creation on the web.
I'm working on some address standardization code (the original was created by Brian W. Grundstrom at Washington National Opera and is available in the shared reports) that we hope is going to help reduce duplicate accounts.
-steve carlock
Santa Barbara Center for the Performing Arts/The Granada
Thanks – I’ll take a look at that, but that sounds more like ensuring that Street is St., etc…
I’m looking more for something along the lines of ensuring a single patron does not have 3 or 4 constituent records because they create a new login every time they use the site.
Currently, our standard is that the login should be equal to the email address. It seems like people forget their login or want to use a different email address so they just create a new account. I don’t care if you have 50 logins associated to your account, I just want to make sure you only have one account.
Thanks!
Nathan Campbell Systems Administrator Dallas Symphony Orchestra Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center Schlegel Administrative Suites 2301 Flora Street Dallas, Texas 75201 214-871-4026 - phone 214-953-1218 - fax n.campbell@DalSym.com www.dallassymphony.com "To entertain, inspire and change lives through musical excellence" Click Here To Buy Tickets
From: Tessitura Web Forum [mailto:forums-tessitura-web@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Steve Carlock Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2009 4:48 PM To: Nathan Campbell Subject: Re: [Tessitura Web Forum] Duplicate Accounts on the Web
From: Nathan Campbell <bounce-nathancampbell1231@tessituranetwork.com> Sent: 4/29/2009 4:09:13 PM
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Hi Nathan,
At Yale, we require the username to be an email address, and we don't allow multiple accounts with the same email address. We also have a forgot password feature, so if a customer tries to create an account online with an email address that is already in use, we direct them to that link. We still get duplicates, because everyone has multiple email addresses, but it helps.
That’s exactly what we are doing as well and we get a ton of duplicates created.
From: Tessitura Web Forum [mailto:forums-tessitura-web@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Mara Hazzard Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2009 3:28 PM To: Nathan Campbell Subject: Re: [Tessitura Web Forum] Duplicate Accounts on the Web
At sdopera.com we feature the Patron Lookup and Forgot Password very prominently. We have also implemented a custom ajax call in the registration form that checks if the email address entered is associated with a patronid. The forgot password utility will email login information if the email address is associated with the account and not just if it is the login. This doesn't prevent people who try new email addresses, but it does help a little. Unfortunately when people only come to your site once or twice a year, they forget.
Nathan, impossible to completely eliminate. However, I think the better your account login page can be designed with the customer in mind, the less duplicates you will get. In other words, good web design and copy will help to minimize the duplicates. We are starting to move towards a Amazon, eBay style web experience where everything is done through the "My account" style cart process. We are in development stages right now, but we hope to have it where it knows who you are automatically when you come back to our site. We'll see how it goes.
We are re-doing our whole website and we are going to add more parameters to the Patron Lookup option. Right now we just use email address as the lookup but we want to add account number and phone as other options. The hurdle we see with this is if there is already a duplicate account how will we present the existing accounts to the patron. There could be 10 John Smiths and lets' say John Smith logs in. His email exists on two accounts. Do we present both accounts and have him choose which one is his? That's our conundrum.
I like the Amazon way also. Christian, what do you mean by using the My Account cart process?
Hi Gloria,
We avoid that problem by using the e-mail address as their login username. Since logins are required by Tessitura to be unique, you can never have more than one login per e-mail address.
-Morgan
We do the same thing – the tricky thing is when someone has more than one email address that they use, or they can’t remember the last one they used, etc….that’s where the majority of our dups come from. One guy with 8 accounts – everything the same except email addresses / login.
From: Tessitura Web Forum [mailto:forums-tessitura-web@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Morgan L'Argent Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2009 10:48 AM To: Nathan Campbell Subject: Re: [Tessitura Web Forum] Duplicate Accounts on the Web
From: Gloria Ormsby <bounce-gloriaormsby5026@tessituranetwork.com> Sent: 6/24/2009 7:58:19 AM