Looking for a consultant to design highly customized employee and customer databases (and more if these go well)

[Greg_Gerst]

We’re looking for a consultant who can listen, brainstorm, and help us take our ideas to a point where we can start trying stuff asap. Our company is based in NY, but the consultant can be anywhere. We use MS Teams for online meetings and collaboration.

We’d like to get going as soon as we find the right person.

Additional notes:

• We’re a commercial building services company (janitorial, windows, construction cleans, special projects, etc)
• We have recurring services customers (low churn), and non-recurring/project customers (sometimes repeat services, sometimes not)
• We have about 200+ employees
• Due to our industry, our employee turnover is higher than “normal”
• We have 100+ customers, ranging from large factories to small offices
• Some customers have more than one building/site
• Our field employees generally work at more than one site, and “report to” more than one supervisor
• Retaining employees becomes a strategic advantage in our industry. We to expand our data collection in a way that will allow us to answer questions like: Which supervisors do the best job retaining employees? Are there customer sites that exhibit higher employee turnover? How important is the distance from an employees home address to their work site(s)? etc
• We have customer information stored across 3 different systems. There is no practical way for these systems to talk with each other for the foreseeable future. We want a customer database that incorporated all the fields necessary for all the systems, and a way of exporting that information formatted to the specific system (we can then manually import/upload that data to our various systems).
• We use Office 365 extensively and would like to integrate w/ Airtable as much as possible. Example: We collect employee and customer feedback using MS Forms. We’d like to design the Airtable database in such as way that integration (even if manual) with our existing systems are as easy as possible.

[Bill_French]

Hi Greg, and welcome to the community!

Greg_Gerst:

We use Office 365 extensively

I’m an integration consultant who works with Airtable and many other platforms. I’m not offering my services and I’m not likely the right fit for this project, but I’m curious - why Airtable? Microsoft has a relatively good pathway to integrate solutions and a fairly good CRM platform.

[Greg_Gerst]

Hi Bill,

I’ve been playing around with Dynamics Sales Professional and am still considering it.

I’ve been a little disappointed with limitations in uploading our excel data into Dynamics. I really like how easy it was to take an existing Excel file (with tons of columns named/formatted exactly as we want) and upload to Airtable. With Dynamics, I haven’t been able to achieve an upload of data laid out the way we like it. Part of this could be ignorance on my part, but user experience with Airtable was been wayyyy better than Dynamics.

I’m curious as to why you ask?

Greg

[Bill_French]

Greg_Gerst:

user experience with Airtable was been wayyyy better than Dynamics.

That’s good to know. Airtable has certainly hit a resonant note on the UI/UX challenge.

Greg_Gerst:

I’m curious as to why you ask?

I like to follow the thought processes that trigger platform decisions. It helps me guide my own investments in integration models and code investments.

Greg_Gerst:

I really like how easy it was to take an existing Excel file (with tons of columns named/formatted exactly as we want) and upload to Airtable.

Also good to know. Unfortunately, unlike Google Sheets, Excel documents tend to be islands of content that lack an easy way to integrate in an automated fashion. Microsoft seems to take pleasure in making switching (and interchange) costs high. While Excel offers friction-less avenues to acquire data, they don’t make it easy to expose data and sometimes to the detriment of exposing it to other Microsoft platforms. But, there are some services that Integromat offers to create the adhesives you might need for advancing your overall CRM quest in Airtable.

[Greg_Gerst]

Thanks Bill. I appreciate you sharing.

I’ll check out Integromat.

[Bill_French]

Greg_Gerst:

I’ll check out Integromat.

A good resource on this forum is @ScottWorld - he knows Integromat inside out.

[Brenkoh]

Hi greg,

I’ve sent you a private message on Airtable.

Looking forward to working with you.

Best Regards,
Brendon.

[ScottWorld]

Thanks, @Bill.French! :slightly_smiling_face:

Yes, I am a Registered Integromat Partner. I sent you a private message, @Greg_Gerst!