In today’s interconnected world, staying connected with customers, vendors, and partners is crucial. But managing a growing network of contacts can quickly become overwhelming.

While spreadsheets can store basic information, they lack the features to truly keep you organized and connected. This is where contact managers come in.

Like it is rightly said:

“A good system shortens the road to the goal.” – Orison Swett Marden

Let’s dive deeper into what contact managers can do and how they can benefit you.


Advantages of a Contact Management system

Benefits of Contact Manager

Improved Customer Relationships:

While interacting with customers, the sales team can directly take notes and understand their issues with products and the more features the customers expect from the product.

Customer retention is more when the sales team has personalized interactions, and better understands customers’ requirements.

These interactions make the customer feel important and help improve customer relationships.

Centralized Data Management:

Contact management will keep your data organized centrally which will easily accessible and tracked by your team. As a result, it will speed up communication and streamline the work process.

Saves time and efforts for your sales team:

While communicating with your customer or lead, a salesperson must have all the information regarding the sales status. To get an in-depth overview of the data, the salesperson can easily log in to the system and check the current situation.

The contact management system makes retrieving, searching, and updating data very easy, saving your team’s time.

They don’t have to go through different spreadsheets or search for email inboxes and invoices. Instead, this time they can use to focus more on important tasks to increase sales.

Smoothen the workflow:

With all the data in one place, your team members are clear about the tasks they need to perform.

In addition, with every step, the customer communication in the system is updated, making it easy for other team members to carry the work lifecycle forward.

 

Do you Know: 70% of buying experiences are based on how the customers feel they are being treated.


Who can use Contact Manager?

Individuals and different industries can easily use the Contact manager. Let us see how a Contact manager will help each of them:

 

Sales Industry

  • Will help to streamline the sales process and improve team communication
  • Can analyze customer requirements and buying patterns
  • Automates repetitive tasks thereby allowing to focus more on essential tasks
  • Makes follow-up easy with leads and prospects through call list feature
 

Marketing Industry

  • Manages low-cost campaign management for customers, leads, and prospects
  • Locks confidential documents to avoid edits by other users
  • Helps analyze customer buying patterns to plan future strategies
  • Efficient in marketing automation
 

Construction Industry

  • Manages customer data with detailed information
  • Promote new offers and updates through Campaign management
  • Automated marketing campaigns for new customers
  • Send invoices, quotes, and estimates online
 

Accounting Industry

  • Stores confidential documents securely with permissions
  • Get paid online through Invoicing
  • Share documents, files, and invoices with clients via customer portal
  • Allows clients to upload documents securely
 

IT Industry

  • Helps to track and resolve software defects
  • Manage clients’ information with Accounts
  • Set team meetings and group events with Calendar
  • Eliminate duplication of information
 

Healthcare Industry

  • Organize and manage patients’ data
  • Share reports and forms via Customer portal
  • Schedule appointments with patients
  • Set permissions to control user access to patients’ confidential information
 

Legal Industry

  • Reduce cost of maintaining paper documents
  • Keeps confidential information secure
  • Allows only view access for cases
  • Provides a 360-degree view of clients’ information and communication
 

Recruitment Agencies

  • Will store and organize the candidate’s detailed information
  • Manage follow-ups with candidates efficiently
  • Works as an Applicant tracking system
  • Search candidates quickly with advanced filters

Must-have features in a Contact Manager:

  • Quick searching contacts from an extensive list of databases is a must-have feature. In addition, the ability to create filters with multiple conditions for advanced search.
  • Follow-up with your leads and customer is a recurring process. So, a reminder is necessary to reach the leads or customers on the desired date.
  • Creating events for client appointments, team meetings, or conferences in the system will give the team members an idea of the daily schedules for each day.
  • Segmentation of contacts based on different criteria will help send newsletters, promotional offers, or marketing promotions to various set of customers
  • Importing and exporting contacts in various formats and from multiple devices is a vital feature. Sync with third-party apps is always preferred by businesses today.
  • Customer behavior analysis can be derived through different kinds of reports, that are useful in the decision-making process during management meetings.

How does Contact Manager software help businesses?

Contact Manager

Real-time access:

A Contact manager provides real-time access to all the data at any time and place. Users who are remote working or working on a site can access the data on any device and update information as required.

Increased Productivity:

Once the system has organized the data efficiently, it becomes easy for the teams to work, which increases their coordination and productivity, allowing the businesses to grow.

Team Collaboration:

The software brings different departments together on the same page to view the data, reducing miscommunication, burnout and helps collaborate effectively to take further actions.

Reduced Cost:

Since the contact management system has multiple features, it eliminates all the manual tasks and costs of purchasing different modules. This all-in-one system saves labor costs and manages all data in one place.

Improves Customer Satisfaction:

Understanding customer needs and their issues is an integral part of customer experience. Quick responses to issues, suggesting new offers, and providing answers to all their queries enrich the customer experience. This will increase customer retention and improve customer satisfaction.

Accurate Data Management:

With storing data in different places and spreadsheets, there are chances of errors in data entry. With web forms, information is directly stored in your contacts database, providing less scope for human error.

ROI

Contact manager reports provide a deep insight into customer behavior. These patterns help to plan sales strategy and target your customers with new offers and campaign management. This planning helps to maximize sales, increasing the return on investment.

Quick Search:

A powerful search feature helps teams to pull out the customer information from a large list of customer database instantly. It saves lot of your team’s time during meeting and when in conversation with clients.

 

Facts: In the world of Internet Customer Service, it’s important to remember your competitor is only one mouse click away.


Points to consider when selecting the best Contact Management Software:

 

Features:

First, find out what features and functionality you need. Accordingly, check different options and select one with features that will blend well with your business.

Also, consider that once your business grows, you may need more features, so find out about the software’s upgrades and availability of customization.

 

Security:

From the provider, find out:

  • How secured is the software?
  • How often backups are taken, in case things go wrong?
  • Do they have a 2-factor authentication system?
  • Can they set role privileges to restrict other users’ access to confidential data or reports?
 

Reviews:

Before buying any software, always search for brand reviews from reputed sites. Also, check for reviews on the usage of software and customer service.

 

Interface

Is the interface of the software you selected easy to use, or will your team require some training?

Find out whether the company will provide some training, demo or does it have enough documentation to understand the working of the system.

 

System Integration

Nowadays, integration with different applications is vital for businesses. Therefore, check whether the software seamlessly integrates with third-party apps.

 

Version

Will you use an online version or install it on your computer or cloud? The online version is usually easy to use, where you must sign in for an online account, and has a monthly billing cycle per user.

For the installed/cloud version, find out the installation process and system requirements to install the software. This version usually has one-time fees or yearly payments.

 

Pricing

Is there a free version of the software available? If yes, will those features in the free version fulfill your business requirements, or do you need advanced features in the paid version? Also, find the introductory pricing per user for the online or installed version.

 

Free Trial

Before making the final decision, it is always wise to check the free trials, where you will get an opportunity to try out the system’s interface, features, and navigation.