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Designing a Flexible CRM Foundation for Scalable Business Workflows

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Overview

SleekFlow allows businesses to store and manage customer data through contact properties. However, as companies grow, their data structures often become more complex and extend beyond basic customer attributes.

To support these advanced needs, we introduced Custom Objects — a flexible data model that allows businesses to define and manage data structures specific to their operations.

This feature enables organizations to store specialized data directly within SleekFlow while maintaining consistency with their workflows, automations, and integrations.

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💡 SleekFlow is a conversational commerce platform that helps businesses manage customer communication, automate workflows, and centralize customer data across messaging channels.

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I led the design of Custom Objects across two phases:

• Phase 1: Custom Properties
  • Focus on 1️⃣ property creation, 2️⃣ field types, 3️⃣ validation and 4️⃣ management
• Phase 2: Relational Object Structures
  • custom object creation
  • arrays of objects
  • record management
  • integration support

The goal was to help businesses model and manage customer-related data based on their unique workflows.

😖 Problem

Contact properties work well for simple customer attributes such as email, phone number, or location. However, they become limiting when businesses need to manage structured or relational data.

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Limited flexibility

Different industries needed different data models. Fixed contact fields could not support diverse business needs

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Limited data relationships

The existing contact model struggled to support one-to-many relationships such as multiple properties, orders, or subscriptions linked to a single customer.

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Disconnected workflows

Teams often relied on external tools to manage business data, creating manual work and reducing operational efficiency.

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For example:

• A real estate company may need to manage property listings
• A fitness studio may track class bookings
• A subscription business may track customer plans or memberships