What is contact management software?
A contact management software or system (CMS) is a tool that helps companies to stay organized. In simple words, it is a database that hosts all important information about clients like name, address, phone number, email address as well as the recorded history of their interaction with the business.
In most companies today, the critical information about customers and potential customers are scattered in various locations across the business – excel spreadsheets, outlook address books, disparate applications, and databases, and other different sources that are difficult to consolidate and share. To get rid of this problem a good contact management system is used.
Read Also: Steps to follow for good battery life
Why do you need Contact Management Software?
Trying to keep track of all of your contacts is quite difficult and laborious without the use of the right software. Luckily there are a wide variety of solutions out there in the market to resolve any issue with tracking communications with customers. The contact management software has the capabilities and feature sets to make managing the contacts a breeze. Now let’s take a look at reasons to use a contact management system for your business.
• To build better customer relationship
The contact management system allows you to store huge amounts of data regarding your existing and potential clients in detail. This data may include customer’s demography age, gender, sex, email, etc. This data gives much clear insight of each customer. For example, you can keep track of customer’s reactions to a specific product or service and record its results. This lets you to keep passive customer feedback which allows you to know your customers at a deeper level.
• To improve the data management
A contact management system removes the possibility of data redundancy and human error. In CMS the data is stored in a central place where it can be accessed by anyone. It provides the secure site of recorded and saved data for those departments working to serve clients like sales, marketing, and customer service.
• To increase productivity
As a CMS system brings sales, support, and marketing teams on the same page, It eventually makes the workflow streamlined and Employees can be more productive. Data entry can be automated with information gathered from web forms. Staffs are able to spend time on more valuable tasks, such as interacting with customers and building better customer relationships.
• To provides deeper insights
We already know that CMS allows us to keep a record of the huge amount of customer data ranging from their personal details to their perceptions. When you have more data about your customer, you eventually have a deeper understanding of how they perceive your brand, what they want you to improve. With the help of this data, you can understand the needs and wants of your customer. You can use this insight to solve their problem by providing them with the right product or services.
What Factors Make A Good Contact Management Software?
Choosing the best contact management software goes beyond making sure they provide the standard CMS tools scoping anywhere from keeping customer records, sales tracking, sales tracking, sales history, email etc. Here are the certain things that help you to choose best contact management software for your business.
Price
Price is an important factor to consider while choosing best contact management system for your growing business. There are a lot of CMS available that are not feasible with every business model. As every business is unique, the features required for one business may not be required for another business. While choosing CMS make sure that you are paying for only those things that you are going to use. So, Choose a CMS that is cost effective yet have all necessary features to manage your contacts efficiently.
Contact List Limit
Most of the CMS tools comes with the certain limit to store and import contacts. Try to find such solutions that doesn’t have such limits. Make sure that you didn’t fall in hidden traps. There are chances that you have to pay extra charge for adding more contacts.
Mobile Access
In a fast paced environment, clients expects replies in a real time. So, you need to choose solution that has a mobile app too. With the CMS in Mobile you can access your contacts anywhere. You can communicate with your clients confidently as all the required details are in your finger tips.
Task Management
Assigning task to team member gives full visibility to everyone on who is doing what. The deadline can be set along with reminder notification to increase work efficiency. While choosing a CMS tool make sure that it has better task management system.
Better User Experience
The solution that you are going to use must have better user interface and experience. It must be easy to sales and marketing teams to get the require data, analyze it and help in decision making. The system for entering data must be fully automated which saves a lot of time.
The Top 4 Contact Management Software
There are lot of Contact Management Software out there in the market. Here we have compiled some of the best contact management software. The list given below is not in the order of preference.
Insightly
The great thing about Insightly’s Contact management System is its automation. It is designed to facilitate interactions with customers, improve collaboration within the business and increase productivity. It integrates google, giving users in-app access to tools like Gmail, Google docs, Google Calendar as well as third party apps like Evernote, Dropbox, Mailchimp etc.
Zoho
The Zoho contact management system provides a unified address book for customer contact, with email and social media engagement tools. It allows you to tracks deals and categorize tasks with the tag feature. There is a mobile app to manage the system when you are out. Zoho makes it easier to close deals by scheduling follow up activities and then closely monitoring results, all on an intuitive dashboard.
Hubspot
Hubspot is the powerful free CMS with tons of accessible tools to enhance your sales cycle from beginning to end. You can keep track of contact website activity, deals, company insights, manage ticketing, manage ads, email tracking and notifications, and even messenger integrations. It allows you to add contact records from gmail and outlook, or corporate email and web forms with one click. This platforms supports upto 1 million contacts and company records, which should comfortably cover pretty much most businesses.
Zendesk
Zendesk is the dynamic CMS that emphasizes the analytical and reporting aspects of the content management system. The analytics of the zendesk makes it possible to make you engage in better conversation with your clients with their prebuilt analytics feature. With them, you can track rep activities, call response times, and live chat interactions. Their rich reporting features ensure you keep a finger on every touchpoint of your sales cycle. This makes it easy to increase the ROI of each sales rep on your team.
You can choose one of these contact management software on the basis of need of your business. If you are using any contact management software already then be sure to share your experience in the comment section.