One of the cornerstones of business is contacts. These include leads, prospects, clients, and loyal customers. It also expands to the employees whose knowledge and skills highly impact the business. Furthermore, there are the investors, suppliers, vendors, and other external stakeholders that the company does transactions with.
As your business grows, the number of contacts expounds as well. Handling your contacts can be overwhelming if there is no system. Learning about contact management can help you and your organization nurture one of the most important assets of your business.
Definition of Contact Management
Contact management refers to the methods and tools used to maintain good communication channels between the business and the people it deals with. This includes organizing, accessing, and even securing the contact database.
Businesses need a highly efficient contact management system to sustain the growing number of contacts. There are several types of contact management tools available in the market for such.
Benefits of Contact Management
1. Ability to share contacts
It can be chaotic if the marketing team and sales team are working on different databases. Poor coordination may lead to unprofessional services to clients. Potential customers will most likely mark redundant emails as spam. Worse, if the marketing team failed to endorse a strong lead to the sales team.
A shared contacts manager will eliminate those risks. Everyone concerned will be updated on all the ins and outs regarding a contact. It gives convenience to everyone as only one centralized database is maintained.
2. Organized labels
Typically, the contacts are alphabetically listed. This can be problematic if you have thousands of people in your phonebook. You have no visual help in discerning who among them are leads, customers, or resellers.
A good contact management app provides folders to which you can sort everyone according to your discretion. In this manner, it would be easy to send marketing materials for the leads and simple holiday greetings for vendors.
3. Mobility and accessibility
This is the digital era- where a job is not necessarily behind the desk from 9 to 5. Contact management platforms ensure that you can reach out to your customers anytime and anywhere you want.
As all contact management apps are cloud-based, choose one that can still give you the contacts even if you are offline. This can be advantageous when you are traveling abroad or anywhere with weak data connections.
4. Consolidate data
Contact data is not limited to phone numbers and email addresses. As you interact with potential customers you can gather trivial information that may help close the deal.
Filing those notes under the contact entry keeps everyone updated about it. This gives the team better insight into the potential customer. In turn, customization of sales pitches and marketing materials can be delivered to have a better conversion.
5. Internal collaboration
A centralized company directory is easier to maintain, update, and keep clean. Everyone automatically knows the contact information of the new hire, no need to ask around often, especially if there is a fast turnaround of seasonal employees.
Furthermore, it only takes one update on the contact database and all the authorized devices are synchronized. It also promotes transparency within the organization.
6. Easier data recovery
As mentioned earlier, contact data is a company asset. Therefore, precautions to secure it must be in place. Contact database deletion, whether unintentional or deliberate, can paralyze the system’s operation. Protecting your data from hackers and thieves might not be enough.
Contact management apps act like a replacement warranty for such misfortune. Choose one that has an unlimited data recovery period feature. This is advantageous because you don’t need to worry about the late discovery of the deletion even of just a single entry.
7. Security and data privacy
Make your clients know that you adhere to data privacy. Use apps that are GDPR, CCPA, and other standards that secure the right to protect their personal data. Your business gets a higher trust rating when customers know that you value their confidentiality.
Takeaway About Contact Management
Contacts is a vital part of any business. Be it external or internal, ensure that proper management takes place in order to prevent data loss and optimize productivity. Avail of the latest technologies in contact management to achieve these.