Create Automated Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

However small your business may be, at some point you will need to store, manage, and act upon a significant amount of data. Data adds up over time and there’s not much you can do but try to manage it effectively.

One example is customer management. Over time, you will attract more and more potential customers, and you will need to keep track of all your prospects and customers.

Often people will try to manage this with spreadsheets, but soon you realize how much spreadsheets are designed to do something else. For example, changing the status of a customer account from “must pay” to “paid” can be inconvenient. Or it can be difficult to create multiple tables with different data and create connections between them.

Let’s see how we can make this better.

NocoDB

NocoDB is an alternative to Airtable, which is a spreadsheet that allows you to do very advanced things.

You can create a table that contains all your customers. Then another that contains all the projects. Then yet another that contains all customer payments.

With NocoDB, you can connect all these tables together, so you can get all this data combined in an orderly way.

What do we mean by “orderly”?

If using a spreadsheet to organize these things, the consistency of the data gets out of hand if you are not extremely careful. With these tools, on the other hand, you can define much more consistent and robust data structures.

Inside NocoDB you can also create webhooks that allow you to trigger events on other services.

For example, imagine you track payments and want your entire team to be notified because the most recent payment received is $1 million.

You can configure NocoDB to execute a webhook every time we enter a payment. To check whether a given payment is, say, over $500,000, you can use Node-RED, which is a very useful automation tool provided by Fortressa.

Node-RED

Node-RED is what we call a “glue service”.

What does that mean? It means it can connect multiple services together to automate the various processes that comprise your workflow.

So in this case, Node-RED receives payment data from NocoDB, and for each payment it checks the amount of the payment. If the payment is above a pre-defined threshold, Node-RED will send a notification to our messaging application. Yay! Now everyone on the team knows about this big win for the company.

This might sound like a silly example, but imagine being able to automate many parts of your internal communication without ever skipping a beat.

Let’s Recap

We are:

• Keeping track of all our prospective and current customers
• Automating communication and collaborative workflows with our team
• Ensuring everyone on our team is informed about big company wins

Fortressa provides you with both of these tools. Usually you would have to create accounts at multiple service providers in order to get this combination, but with Fortressa you can get this combination and many others — all from the same place.

Contact us or enter your email below to get this very useful combination of tools.