CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is essential for every business. You can keep all your customer information on an Excel file, it is still a CRM system, just that no fancy functions, and not able to share and update properly among staff.
The principle of CRM is, manage your customer data easily, and able to search with no stress, and secure without headache even your staff left the company.
You don’t need a fancy CRM, but a good and simple CRM definitively will be helpful, even if you are the only one in the entire business.
So we've got a problem
Your boss, or you yourself don’t have a big budget for some fancy and advanced CRM, but you know you need 1… so we have a few options
- Hire a custom development team.
- Straightforward, they do what you want, and you get what you want at the end of the day
- The problem is, most of the time the project owner don’t know what they want (although they claim they do), and cause the running hours keep increasing, and hence the cost
- Get an online solution
- There are some serious online / off the shelve solutions, you get some of the best practice solutions as well.
- You may get what you want, and pay for some other functions you don’t need, or sometime may not suite your business 100%
- Get low code
- As mentioned, maybe working on the prototype after a while, you finally know what you want, and you have the freedom to design the way you want
- The problem is, you need to do it yourself.
Well, since the site is all about low code / no code, hence we will start something simple with low code.
Let’s nail down some basic requirement
- Create / Edit customer data
- Assign person in-charge for each customer
- Person in-charge only see their own customer
The data structure:
Name | Type | Mandatory | Length | Remarks |
Name | Text | Yes | 255 | |
Email | Text | Yes | 255 | |
Phone | Text | Yes | 10 | The length is based your own local phone common phone length |
Assigned To | Personnel | No | N/A | Person in-charge |
Status | Text | Yes | 10 | New / Assigned / In Progress / Success / Failed |
Remarks | Long Text | No | Unlimited |
Take note of the status
- New – When an admin enter the lead
- Assigned – When admin assign a person in-charge to the lead
- In Progress – When the person in-charged working on the lead
- Success – When the lead successfully become a customer
- Failed – When the person in-charge lost the lead
Test Data
We will need some test data to start with
- Sample customers data in CSV file format – download a sample from here.
- 1st personnel – Rick Grimes, and the email is [email protected]
- 2nd personnel – Shane Walsh, and the email is [email protected]
The Solutions
There are many low code solutions able to fulfill above requirement. I will start with a few, and keep updating here with new solutions.
NocoDB
NocoDB is an advanced version of Excel, which definitely can do more when come to manage your customer data, and suitable for a team of personnel, and the best part, it is open source and free.
SeaTable
SeaTable is an advanced version of Excel, which definitely can do more when come to manage your customer data, and suitable for a team of personnel.
NocoBase
It is not NocoDB, but also open source, and equally awesome! Moreover, it is designed by developer, for developer, which basically you just need to maintain your developer “sense” when creating application with NocoBase
APITable
APITable is a new kid on the block when come to table-based low code platform, the awesome ACL control make it a suitable CRM tool when you need a bit more of control.
