From the moment you decide to start a business you have to consider how you are going to manage your customer data.

A good organization in your customer database can be crucial to your company’s success.

A client database is a file or list where the data of our clients or leads appears.

There are different tools for that purpose, which we will discuss in this post. Each company must decide which one will be most effective for them, depending on their needs.

Okay, all right. We already know what a customer database is. But how can we make it useful for our need?

The first thing we have to decide is which data should be included in our database. Elements such as name, surname, telephone number, e-mail address, etc. are indispensable. From there, we can choose which data are, or are not, relevant to store: age, address, date of birth (useful for sending an anniversary greeting) and even postal address.

Above all, we must bear in mind the new GDPR about what data will be stored and how.

You must decide what is important to enter into that database. It would not be effective to just collect data.

Once we have decided what information is relevant and which fields should be included in the database, we must decide where they will be stored.

A good location to store our database represents almost 80% of its success.

We must also bear in mind what actions we are going to carry out with the stored information: emailing campaigns, market studies, etc. There are infinite possibilities.

Today there are different tools on the market that allow us to develop, feed and store our database.

We have to decide which of them can be more beneficial in terms of ease of use and benefits. We must bear in mind that it meets the needs we want to meet by using it.

It is not a novelty that many companies, especially the smaller ones, work with this type of files. The well-known “Excel” are a good option when there is little information, you want a free tool or you like to include the fields you want.

The great disadvantage of this type of file is when handling large amounts of data: endless rows and columns, cells with too much information, and so on. And another drawback of Excel files is accessibility: not all workers will be able to access it, it may not be updated, it is not secure in terms of data storage, …

As we have seen in other blog entries, a Customer Relationship Management is nothing more than a tool designed to manage your customers’ data and the interactions you have with them.

uSell CRM allows, in addition to storing the data of your customers, segment the information of the same ones to our whim, include information on orders and even Incorporate reports with the information of the interactions that we have had with the client.

We must not forget about accessibility: all workers to whom we give permission will have access. This allows uSell CRM to become a live, accessible, up-to-date and secure DDBB. Only users with passwords can access it, and the data is encrypted from end to end. We will be able to recover the data quickly thanks to automatic backups.

For this reason, being a 100% solution of CRM in Cloud offers all the benefits of having a portable but secure database.

If we already have our database in Excel, importing it into uSell CRM is very easy.

Finally we have the known as ERP. These programs include, in addition to customer data, other more complex aspects indicated for the internal management of the company: accounting, invoicing, stock, human resources and even internal communication.

Although it is true that some of them allow us to store our clients’ data, their essential function is not that.

Take care of your database:

• Centralize the information: It must be accessible to the workers of your company who need it.
• It must be alive: feed it constantly.
• Security: It must be secure, as your customers’ data deserve it.
• Support in Spanish: If the language of your users is Spanish, an indispensable quality is that the support is in that language.

Knowing all this, the advantages we obtain with the use of a CRM tool to manage our company’s customer database are much greater than the use of tables in Excel.

And you, would you like to leave your old Excel table and try our CRM Free Demo?