3 Steps to Building Solid Customer Relationships

• Excel: Excel is a robust data management platform and can easily serve as a customer dashboard. While Excel is worth considering given its flexibility and low cost, it's not for the faint of heart.
• Custom SQL database: For companies with developer/programmer resources, a custom SQL database is a fantastic option. A custom database provides flexibility plus advanced querying capabilities to build insights between data sources.
• Shopping cart platform: E-commerce companies have shopping carts that capture customer data. Many cart platforms allow the addition of custom fields. With the right integration, you can build a rich customer story where your customers are actually purchasing products.
• Marketing automation platform: Increasingly, e-commerce companies are expanding beyond email newsletters into the world of "marketing automation," which delivers tailored content. This ensures higher customer engagement and provides a rich source of information tied to customers’ email addresses.
• Customer relationship management (CRM) platform: Often pegged as a sales tool for service companies, CRMs provide customizable profiling capabilities. An integrated CRM will append additional information to customer profiles.

2. Identify your data sources. Once you've chosen a customer dashboard, you must identify where the data comes from. Consider the following: