Create a Customer Database In 3 Steps
A Quick & Easy Guide on How to Create a Customer Database
Managing customer data efficiently is a core business function. For many smaller businesses, the first customer database or customer relationship management software (CRM) is an Excel file or Google Sheets spreadsheet, containing customer, order, and payment information. Yet, spreadsheets are prone to breakdowns, data errors, and inaccuracies. A robust customer database built on a scalable and secure architecture can help overcome these problems.
Let’s go ahead and learn how to develop a customer database. Scroll down to access a free template application that stores data about customers, orders, and suppliers.
Why Build a Customer Database?
Investing in a customer database is not just about storing customer data; it’s about leveraging that data to build stronger customer relationships, optimize operations, and ultimately, increase profitability.
The three biggest benefits of having a customer database in place are:
1. Enhanced Customer Relationship Management
A customer database supports the sales and marketing teams and leads to a better customer experience through personalized marketing and communications. In addition, it allows for easy segmentation based on various criteria, such as purchase history, location, or business size. This makes it easier to implement targeted marketing strategies.
2. Better Business Insights
A customer database introduces data-driven decision-making to businesses. It provides valuable insights through data analysis, helping business owners or sales teams make informed business decisions. It also makes it easier to analyze sales trends and patterns, such as peak periods or popular products.
3. Legal and Compliance Benefits
A well-designed customer database ensures that customer data is stored securely, protecting against data breaches or unauthorized access. It also aids record keeping by maintaining accurate customer transactions data.
What Is a Customer Database?
A customer database is a centralized collection of information about a business’s customers, including personal details, contact information, purchase history, preferences, and interactions with the company.
A customer database allows businesses to store and organize customer data systematically, making it easily accessible for various purposes such as marketing, sales, and customer service. By maintaining a comprehensive database, businesses can gain insights into their customer base, enabling them to tailor their products, services, and communications to meet customers’ specific needs and preferences.
In essence, a customer database serves as the backbone of effective customer relationship management (CRM). Popular examples of off-the-shelf CRM systems are Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, or Hubspot CRM. These off-the-shelf systems are great solutions but can be expensive or cumbersome to implement. A custom CRM offers the advantage of being tailored to your business.
CRM systems help businesses track and analyze customer behavior, identify trends, and segment customers based on various criteria. This data-driven approach allows businesses to create personalized experiences for their customers, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Additionally, a well-maintained customer database enhances operational efficiency by providing a single source of truth for customer information, ensuring that all departments have consistent and accurate data to work with.
Customer Databases in Excel
When it is time to create a custom database, many people start with tools like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.
While these spreadsheet-based solutions can be convenient for smaller organizations, they often lead to significant issues as your operations grow. Here are some common problems associated with using spreadsheets:
1. Version Confusion:
Different departments or users might have their own local copy of the spreadsheet, leading to multiple versions like “CustomerDatabase_NEW,” “CustomerDatabase – v2.1,” “Old Customer Database – DO NOT USE,” etc.
2. Lack of Version and Access Control:
Without clear ownership or version control, changes made by different team members can be lost or duplicated, especially if the person responsible for updates leaves the company.
3. Data Inconsistencies:
Comments, highlights, and manual updates can lead to a cluttered and error-prone spreadsheet. For example, marking inactive members in red can easily be overlooked or misinterpreted.
Setting up your database in a spreadsheet can ultimately defeat the purpose of having a single, reliable source of truth. Instead of efficient customer management, you end up constantly managing and cleaning up multiple spreadsheets.
Free Customer Database Template App
How to Create a Customer Database in 3 Steps
Building a customer database usually requires technical knowledge that someone working in a business function might not have. For instance, you’d need a substantial understanding of database languages like SQL, not to mention the front-end development for user interaction.
Five is an online database builder designed to make creating a customer database much faster.
Creating a customer database with Five won’t be entirely effortless, but the good news is that we have a free template available! It will also be significantly easier than spending 60+ hours learning various coding frameworks and languages.
With Five, you can
1. Set up your database in minutes, and
2. Auto-generate a user-friendly web interface for your database.
3. Import your existing customer data from Excel, Google Sheets, or CSV files, allowing you to get started quickly.
Five also offers the flexibility to create custom business logic with code, generate membership PDF reports, and visualize your data through custom charts and dashboards.
Additionally, you can set up email notifications for your customers, ensuring your communication is seamless, standardized, and automated.
Get free access to Five here and start building a customer database.
Step 1: List Out Customer Attributes
Start by compiling a complete list of all attributes relevant to your customers. Think about what matters to your business: first name, last name, address, and email are most likely must-haves. Beyond those mandatory fields, what else would you like to know about your customers? Their date of birth? The company they are working for? Their job title? List out all attributes relevant to your business and its customer interactions.
Your customer database should be a “single source of truth”, so ensure it’s as comprehensive as possible.
Here are some must-have attributes typically included in a customer database:
- First Name
- Last Name
- Phone
- Address
- City
- State
- Postal Code
- Country
- Date of Birth
- Registration Date
Step 2: Define Other Important Information
Apart from storing information about your customers and who they are, your customer database is supposed to track how your customers interact with your business: which product did they order? Which purchases did they make?
Define what these interactions are, and how to describe them.
When in doubt, it is usually better to store more data, so be as detailed as possible.
Step 3: Creating Your Customer Database
Your list of customer attributes and other important information is ready? Great, let’s move all of this into a proper database.
To do so, sign up for Five, an online database builder that comes with a simple point-and-click interface for creating relational databases.
Follow the steps described in this video tutorial to build your database tables, forms, and reports:
Customer Database: Free Sample Application
Here’s a free customer database template application, created in just 15 minutes.
Customer Database Schema
Here’s the database schema for our application.
The customer database schema consists of several interconnected tables:
- At its heart is the Customer table, storing information about customers;
- The Orders table holds information about orders customers have placed;
- The OrderDetails table is used to keep track of products and shippers related to an order.
- Last, the other tables, such as Employees, Suppliers or Shippers help store other relevant information to successfully manage the customer relationship and customers’ purchases.
Each table holds specific information, such as customer details, payment records, orders and products, ensuring a comprehensive and organized structure. The relationships between these tables facilitate efficient data management, enabling seamless tracking of customers’ business interactions, orders, and products.
Customer Database: Key Features
A Customizable Customer Database
We started by defining the fields (attributes) we wanted to store in our database using Five’s Table Wizard, a user-friendly, point-and-click database design tool. Add as many fields as you wish to your membership database. The database is fully customizable.
1. Simple-to-Use Forms
We then created the form that our users can interact with, again using just a few clicks.
2. Searchable and Online
Our customer database is searchable and hosted online. It can be accessed by anyone (with login credentials), anywhere at any time.
3. Login Protected and Secure
Securing data is paramount for organizations of all sizes: Five comes with a pre-built authentication feature that adds a login screen to your application. Only registered users with valid credentials can view or edit data. You can also add multi-factor authentication for extra security.
4. Add a Simple Customers Dashboard
You can also add a dashboard that provides insights into customers and orders (such as average order value, or number of orders per week/month) to your application. This gives you a bird’s eye view on your customers.
Get Started with Five Today
To build your customer database with Five, sign up for free access and start the process. If you need assistance, visit our forum to get help from our application development experts as you add more features to your database application.
By following the steps mentioned above, you can create robust and scalable customer software tailored to your needs, all while using the tools provided inside of Five.
