Cloud storage of a customer database?

Does anyone use any sort of on-line storage of data on your customers?

I have tried different CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software packages, and I find them cumbersome to use.

I am thinking more along the lines of a spreadsheet with all customer info.



I want to be able to market to them after they have used my services. I really need it to be on-line, as opposed to committed to a single computer, so I can access info whether I am in Michigan or Florida.

Hi Burley.

Their are several services out their. You can look into drop box. Though the service is not secure and has been plagued with people getting hacked.

I work for an IT company and we are developing just such a solution you are looking for it will be available in a few months and will cost about 50 cents / GB a month.

Why not use one of the many off the shelf CRM programs that allow the customers to also access, and update information?

If you create an interactive, online experience where they have some type of implied benefit, like maybe if they complete their information you give them a discount, or if they give their profile link to a customer, and they sign up, and you do business with them they get points they can apply towards a discount.

You could also make in interactive to the point your customers could even look at their historical transactions, which of course would be of benefit to them at the end of the year when they claim what the sold or donated against what they owe the government.

There are so many different ways you can do this, and so many open source projects you can utilize, that it shouldn't cost much, the money you save you can use to hire a web expert to put something together for you. You could even use CMS software instead of CRM, many of the open source CMS applications have CRM applications built in. If you sign up with a company like Host Gator, you can have any of these automatically installed, and manage them with reasonable ease.

I have yet to do it myself, but this is the direction I am going. I am going to pay a college student I have been talking with about this for the last couple months, to put together CRM software that has CMS applications. Eventually it will also be my online store with other aspects that pertain to my business. The nice thing about CRM software is that you can grow or expand it in any direction you desire, and there are so many people out in the world that understand the more popular programs so well, you will never have a shortage of qualified people willing to work on your website for reasonable prices. And if you do choose hostgator, they have the other applications you can apply to your website like an online store, etc.

Rather than designing something that does what you want it to right now, you might be better served using something you can eventually grow into. And since you probably don't know right now what you want next year, or the year after, or 5 years down the road, you might do well to start with something you can take to the next level when the time is right.

If you plan on keeping anything in the cloud, you are going to eventually need a hosting site. Dropox and things like it work great, I use dropbox myself, but for more complex and reliable software, you might want to consider professional hosting. It's not expensive and you can continue to grow your web presence.

Scott

Wow, Scott, thanks for all the info. But my needs are simpler than that. A spreadsheet would be fine. Maybe I could even make it a hidden page on my website. Simple, simple, simple, is what I am striving for.

If all you need is free space in the cloud to host an excel formatted file you can use dropbox, it's free and reasonably reliable, I have never had any problems with it. Whenever I post a link to pictures, or documents on this forum, I always do it in my dropbox public folder and provide a link to it. Here is the dropbox website:

https://www.dropbox.com/

If you have an iPhone or Android you can even set it to auto update your pictures folder when you snap pictures, and you can access you dropbox from any web enabled computer system or smartphone.

Scott