Customer information in small service businesses tends to be everywhere at once. The owner's phone, the accounts spreadsheet, old email threads, a sticky note on the monitor. Each copy is slightly different and nobody is quite sure which is right.
What goes wrong
- Invoices go to a contact who left last year.
- An engineer turns up at an old address.
- The same customer exists twice, with jobs split between them.
- Nobody can see all the work done for a customer in one place.
One record per customer
Each customer should exist once, with the company name and main address, a billing contact and email, site addresses if they have more than one location, and any notes about access, preferences or contract terms.
Link everything to it
Jobs, sites, invoices and certificates should link to the customer record rather than having the customer's name typed into each one. Then a change of email address happens once and is right everywhere.
History at a glance
When a customer rings, whoever answers should see recent jobs, open jobs and unpaid invoices in seconds. It makes you sound organised, because you are.
Keep it tidy
Customer lists get messy over time. A few habits help:
- search before creating a new customer
- archive customers you no longer work with instead of deleting them
- review contacts once a year
Remember it's personal data
Contact details are personal data. Collect only what you need, keep it secure and make sure only the right people can see it.
OmniSchema's Customer Directory kit gives you one customer list with contacts and addresses. Other lists, like sales invoices and work orders, link to a customer properly rather than by typed name, so everything about a customer can be found from one place.