CRM & relational databases
A customer, prospect and vendor management system — so a person’s history stops depending on whoever happened to handle their last case.
- Role
- Product designer — end to end
- Industry
- Insurance & claims · Regulated
- Surface
- Web platform, B2B multi-tenant
- Scope
- Data modelling, dashboards, permissions, retention
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Where this started
Records for each end customer tended to live individually across different systems and places, with no real way to see the full history of a customer’s life cycle.
That left the single source of truth resting on human organization, documentation discipline and clean hand-offs — three things that do not survive volume.
What needed to be true
A single customer could have dozens of cases, each living under a different case owner. Building a complete picture of that customer’s records — and knowing what follow-up was owed once cases closed — depended on going person by person.
The hard parts
- Migrating existing customer data into these database inputs
- Setting up dynamic follow-up automations conditioned by each customer’s data
- Organizing mass volumes of information for a given customer into a manageable, understandable dashboard experience
- A roles and permissions model enforcing privacy policy on customer data access
- A retention feature to clean databases based on conditions, driven by law and regulation
- Database creation and conditional-logic automation setup for non-technical users
What we built
A CRM-style database where you can create different types of customers, define their data points, and relate them to cases — and to the data living under those cases.
Each assigned customer got a dashboard view: what they have been up to, who is responsible for their current status and next tasks, a record of past cases and outcomes, and the automations set up for that customer type to follow up in future — either by the system, or by notifying a specific employee.
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What changed
- A centralized repository of every customer moving through the company — past, present and future
- One organized record per customer, with full auditability
- Direct relationships to everything else on the platform: cases, forms submitted, files uploaded