Introduction

Is it Tom from the Marketing department or the Production department? Talking to a customer for the first time, trying to store customer information in your head or on a spreadsheet, but that may get lost or you probably will not remember where you put that. Your business must have a clear way of organizing contacts which can also be accessible to relevant team members across your organization. You need a contact management system that will help you streamline your contacts for better management.

To stay organized and managed in the best possible way for your contacts, Contact Management Systems are the best platforms to integrate in your organization.

In the following blog we will introduce you to details and in-depth knowledge of Contact Management Systems and how they help you streamline processes for your contacts in the organization. 

Contactbook Dashboard

What is a Contact management system?

Simply put, the Contact Management System is a platform that lets you manage and organize contacts across your organization. This applies for both personal contacts and business contacts.

Contact Management Softwares also let you share contacts. It eliminates the hassle of manually selecting and sharing individual contacts one by one. This is possible when you create groups of contacts and share them with relevant people with the help of Contact Management Softwares.

Contact Management System is that comprehensive platform that does more than just managing and sharing contacts. These platforms let you save documents, notes, reminders around contacts and much more. 

It helps you keep all the contact data in one place rather than having it in dispersed places and different platforms. This centralized data helps in keeping a perfect pace of productivity inside the team by eliminating the delay and hassle of finding the right contacts easily. 

Contact Management Softwares helps you have a better alignment and collaboration across teams and increases customer satisfaction as well, considering the features are comprehensively used. 

Your contacts are the heart of every piece of your marketing and sales strategy. Whether you have a database of five contacts or 10K contacts, you need to understand how you manage your contacts.

I would say that if your company implements the Contact Management System, it can cater to the needs of the customer better. The records of the customer can now be studied to understand his or her preferences and implement them for each individual lead. This way you can establish personalized connections.

With the contact management software, you can usually make entries for each of your contacts. These can be contact details such as name, telephone number, email address, or company.

The contact management tools organize this information so that you can find it easily. The data can also be searched. The contact management software also offers functions such as tracking customer business interactions as well as some planning functions such as the ability to organize customer meetings on a calendar.

Contactbook importing 600 contacts

Why integrating and gathering data is the core of success

The key to company success now lies in the ability to integrate and gather customer contact information at a single place. Though as per the Harvard Business Review reports, most companies still remain badly behind the curve:

  • “Cross-industry studies have shown that on average, less than half of an organization’s structured data is actively used in making decisions—where less than 1% of its unstructured data is analyzed or used at all.”
  • “More than 70% of employees have access to data they should not.”
  • “80% of a data analyst’s time is spent on just discovering and preparing data.”

We’re now faced with new challenges; be it cross-department communication, providing competitive customer experiences, or making critical decisions on the fly. Correctly gathering data on customers and users deliver huge benefits to organizations across all sectors – which is why companies turn to new solutions in data aggregation that improve that performance.

Don’t you think this is something that we have just talked about! 

Use of Contact Management in Business

A Contact Management System Is a program that enables you to store and manage contact information. They are essentially databases that track all your information and communication based on your contacts. A contact management system offers many benefits for the organization, which include:

Centralized Contacts

  • Centralization of information which makes it easy to search for contacts- Anyone in the organization can access the relevant contacts anytime they want, basically, it helps you avoid all the manual search work!

Storing additional data with Contacts

  • Documents, notes, and conversation management -  It also enables you to add notes and club relevant documents, so when in need you find them easily and quickly. 

Easy Import & Export of Contacts

  • With Contact Management Systems, you can easily import contacts in formats like CSV or VCF. You can also connect your favorite tools like Google Contacts, Outlook Contacts or Apple Contacts amongst others. Same set of contacts can be managed and exported when required.

Timely Contact Backups

This is important as any contact data you lose will directly affect your business. You don’t want to let it happen at any cost. Contact Management systems provide this facility to backup your contacts on regular intervals which is very helpful.

Contact sharing - keeping privacy in mind

Some of the Contact Management systems also provide facilities to share contacts with your colleagues. You can categorize your contacts and then share groups with particular users which will need access to those groups of contacts. This is also essential that NOT ALL contacts are shared with everyone in the team. Contact management systems also provide facilities to incorporate different access levels for users.

Contacts are the lifeline of today’s competitive business environment, and their management is one of the most critical factors for the successful running of any business. With increasing sales funnels and an ever-growing list of associates, suppliers, and vendors, Contact Management Systems has emerged as one of the most important and useful tools for seamless business management.

Top 5 benefits of Contact Management System in Business

  1. Contacts can be fragmented across different platforms and media.
    For example, you might have a stack of business cards, half a dozen leads on your iPhone, several notes and diaries, and a few hundred connections on LinkedIn. Good contact management software will link them together but also give a tag for where it comes from.
  2. Contact Management software is easy to use and can be neatly integrated into other tools.
    It meets the basic needs of professionals who regularly come into contact with new people or a company that is acquiring a lot of contacts and needs to organize them to be able to search and filter through .
  3. Lower expenditures.
    This is something that would be appreciated by all scales of business. Good contact management softwares offers you various integrations like storage for saving documents, personal and public notes, reminders, and so much more. This way, you do not have to maintain and pay different platforms for these functions. 
  4. Complete control over relevant person’s access to the contacts.
    Contact Management Softwares offer you an admin panel which lets you decide who can and cannot have access to certain groups or contacts in the organization. 
  5. Improves communication within and outside the organization
    The order that it brings with it means that communication with contacts and between all members who use the system improves. A contact management software can also help with marketing operations, sales cycle productivity, and service delivery. It does this by creating more accessible and trustworthy information about current and potential customers as well as colleagues and other connections.

At best, contact management software enables departments that frequently deal with customers, such as sales and marketing, customer service, and technical support, to work together and coordinate cross-functional activities.

How to effectively manage and organize contacts?

Whether small or large companies, the variety of contacts is the same; the size may vary. You have customers, distributors, suppliers, and subcontractors, etc. It is not possible to manage such large lists from smartphones or e-mail servers.

Even if you can somehow manage the details; It's impossible to derive meaningful and relevant information when you really need it. Routine standard systems do not meet your needs. They are stand-alone systems that cannot be integrated into the surrounding solution.

What is the way out then? The answer is simple: use a complete contact management solution. It's practical, useful, and effective.

  1. Effectively manage contacts
    Of course, basic demographic information (name, contact numbers, and address) is essential, but an effective contact management system does a lot more. e.g. registration of purchased services or products; expected services and products preferred by the customer, transaction information and information related to the project, etc.
    Not only does it provide a user-friendly presentation of information, but it also allows users to expand and edit existing information. with robust contact management software.
  2. Provides tools to organize data
    Once you have business contacts with relevant information, you need tools to get meaningful information. When you implement a good contact management system, you provide an opportunity to summarize the important categories. You can search by applying relevant filters.
    For example, customers who have bought a certain product can easily be filtered. This makes it easy for you to derive a cross-sell or up-sell strategy. You can also target promotions based on usage patterns.
    Not only customers but also grouping and filtering can help manage subcontractors or suppliers.

How to choose the best Contact Management Software

By now we largely discussed contact management software and its importance. So the question arises of how to choose a software that caters to your organization! While selecting any contact management software just takes two factors.

  • The Pool of services offered - Find yourself a contact management software that enables  you to Manage and Share Contacts, Create and Share Workspace, Take Private & Public Notes and also add Add Documents and Tags
  • The Cost - It is equally important to take into account the cost factor, so it is advisable to look for some software that offers a free trial. This will help you make use of it before you actually pay for it.

Choosing the right Contact Management System comes with a lot of responsibility. What kind of responsibilities basically? Responsibility to consider every aspect of your company and see what features every system incorporates. 

For example, ContactBook is one of the best contact management systems for business organizations. You can check other contact management systems as well but this is one platform that offers you great features for managing and organizing contacts across your business. 

What do you get in ContactBook?

  1. You can import your existing contacts and also create and manage new contacts.
  2. You can save and share contacts in groups. 
  3. You can add documents to contacts.
  4. You can add private & public notes to contacts. 
  5. You can add reminders.
  6. You can have complete control over who has access to contacts as an admin panel.

Apart from these, there are various other integrations and features that ContactBook has to offer you for smooth communication within and outside the business. 

To know pricing plans and other features, you can click here

Conclusion

In the competitive scenario, loss of opportunity equals commercial loss. Therefore, you shouldn't miss a single opportunity to close a deal. A well-managed contact list allows you to increase your business.

When, after careful research, you set up a state-of-the-art platform, you get performance that exceeds your expectations. Make sure to have someone who can maintain the system and administer when needed. 

Even if you have to pay more for security features, consider doing that. The contact management system contains the most valuable and confidential data that you need to protect at all costs. No unauthorized user should have access to any contacts which they are not supposed to see.

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