Customer Data

Rethinking customer data

As a consultant, I often pick up lots of little tidbits about a customer. Little things like server serial numbers or driver versions. Or the way I reconfigued their server last week. Typically I collect this info in service tickets using Ian Landsman's very nice HelpSpot software, but very often I find myself looking up some little bit of data over and over again. Or wanting a current bird's eye view of systems. Searching through a few hundred tickets to find this data just doesn't get it done for me.

I've taken to creating a network overview doc for each customer, using GoogleDocs, but even that gets cumbersome after awhile. What I want is more of a wiki style and less of a word/spreadsheet document style. I'd also like to be able to easily hand the whole thing off to the customer at the end of the engagement. Googledocs are okay for this purpose, but not great. I've come to love Zoho wiki, but anything I create here is tied to my account. I haven't found a way to just give a specific wiki to another person/entity.

I guess the solution is:

• Create a new gmail account. something like companynamewiki@gmail.com 
• Use this account to create a new Zoho account and wiki
• Fill the wiki with data
• Give customer the urls, usernames and password to both the gmail and zoho accounts.