Tutorial 3: Managing your customer database

Video duration: 4 mins 24 seconds

This tutorial demonstrates how your system records your customer inquiries and shows you how to access those through your Online Business Console and edit your customer records. It should take about 15 minutes to complete but feel free to work through at it your own pace.

Getting Started

When you created your Online Business, a default "Contact Us' form should have been created with your site. If you haven't got a 'Contact Us' form don't worry, you can add one by following this article: Web_form.

To understand how your online business captures customer inquiries and stores it in your database, you'll need to put yourself in your customers shoes and fill out the form on your contact form then submit it. Make sure you put your real email address in and you also tick the 'Subscribe to Monthly Newsletter' box.

After you've submitted your contact form, you'll be automatically shown a confirmation screen and a responder email will also be sent to your email address. This is fully automated and you have the option of customizing the appearances of these responses.

Online Business Live Feed

Login to your Online Business console scroll down to beneath the traffic and sales graphs. You will see your live feed where all your customer database interactions are recorded.

At the top of your live feed you'll see that your webform submission was recorded as a customer interaction. All online shop purchases, webform submissions, email newsletter opens, comments etc. are shown here in real time as visitors interact with your site. When you click on an event, it will take you to the customer record for the customer who performed that action.

Searching and Editing Your Customer Records

All the functionality for searching, editing and exporting your customer records, cases (webform submissions), orders, bookings and sales opportunities can be found underneath the customer tab.

Click on the Customer option tab to bring up the database view for your customers, you'll find that only todays new customers are shown but you can change the filter (shown by the green arrow) to show customers who were added in the last week, last month etc.

You should see the new customer record that was automatically created when you submitted the webform. Click on 'View' to see the details of this customer record.

The detailed view of the customer record shows all the information that the system has collected through the webforms on your site such as their contact details and it also shows a customer specific live feed of their interactions on your site. You're also able to edit this record manually by clicking on the 'edit' button in the corner.

Bringing Up Your Customer Inquiries

Now that you're looking at a specific customer record, you're also able to bring up the cases, orders, opportunities and bookings that are associated with the customer by clicking on the appropriate action box button. Bring up the customer cases.

This will give you a list of all the cases for that customer, you should see the one that was created for your webform submission.

Click on the 'Contact Us' Form to see the details for that form. You'll see that the form details that have been recorded are at the bottom of the form. If you create webforms with custom fields for collecting specific information from a customer it will also appear in this area.

Are You Following Up?

From one simple webform inquiry, your Online Business has created a customer record with their contact details, subscribed this customer to your email newsletter list and created a case to record the webform data! Not only that but it's sent you an sms and an email to alert you and others if you wish so you'll follow-up the inquiry faster than your competitors can.

You can explore more about the customer database by following the links below. Otherwise you can move onto the next topic where you'll be learning about sending email newsletters to market your online business.

• Tutorial 3.1: Adding and editing customers - shows all the features related to customers
• Tutorial 3.2: Customizing webforms and editing cases - indepth tutorial on how customized webforms work with cases
• Tutorial 3.3: Customer orders
• Tutorial 3.4: Setting up customer bookings
• Tutorial 3.5: Using opportunities - indepth tutorial on how to create sales opportunities automatically from inquries, and how to use opportunities
• Tutorial 3.6: Database importing and exporting - tutorial to show how to import and export customer records