How do you keep customer data current across your company?
I'm doing customer development for a potential pivot and wanted to learn more about:
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Do you have a process and/or toolset to keep your customer data up-to-date across your organization?
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Do you have a unified customer database/customer data platform that works as a central source of truth for all of your business departments?
Any advice and recommendations for processes and tools are welcomed.
Not much of an issue for me now I'm full time on Dependabot, but at my old company (GoCardless) this was a pain.
Every tool we used wanted to be the single source of truth on customers, for obvious reasons, and it was super painful. Salesforce, Mixpanel, Desk (now part of Salesforce), our admin panel, etc.
What would have been great is something that helped make them all achieve their desire of being the "single" source of truth - perhaps a service in the middle that hoovered up each service's data and then made it available to all the other ones easily.
Thank you, Grey!
What was painful exactly?
Wondering if the guys at GoCardless tried to solve it in any way?
I do a mix of thing:
Customer interviews in Confluence. It's easy for me to update and link docs as it's a wiki
Intercom for interactions and notes (so, some kind of light CRM if you will)
I haven't had a need for more in my bootstrapped project. In previous larger orgs it'd be synced on a CRM (in-house, then salesforce).
Thank you, Sten.
Do you use any other tools to store customer data apart from Confluence and Intercom or that's all?
I assume the larger orgs you previously worked at used a number of different apps to store customer data?
Yeah, they built their own CRM at first and then started to migrate the data in Salesforce. I won't be able to tell you much more about it though.
The different apps would also store their billing info in a shared datastore for account information.