What Is Contact Management Software?

In many companies today, mission-critical information about existing and potential customers is scattered in various locations across the business – housed in separate Excel spreadsheets, Outlook address books, disparate applications and databases, and other sources that are difficult to consolidate and share. To help solve this problem, firms across all industries are considering the purchase of a contact management software solution.

What are the Benefits of Contact Management Software?

A contact management software package can help companies to overcome the challenges associated with information fragmentation and inconsistency by empowering them to dramatically improve the way they access, manage, and share vital data about their customers and prospects.

Gone are the days when the sales department maintained opportunity and sales history information in one system, while the post-sale support team logged and tracked service activities in another. Contact management software centralizes, streamlines, and standardizes all relevant contact-related information, making it readily available to all those who interface with existing and potential clients.

A contact management software package can significantly enhance the effectiveness of all types of contact interactions, as well as the productivity of sales cycles, marketing operations, and service delivery by facilitating the creation of consistent, up-to-date, and easy to access information about existing and potential clients and their histories. This in turn makes it much easier for the various customer-facing departments such as sales, marketing, customer service, and help desks to collaborate together and coordinate cross-function activities.

How Does it Work?

With a contact management software package, the entry, storage, and retrieval of information about contacts and their related activities is fully automated and completely consolidated. Customer-facing staff, regardless of their department or role, can add, update, and retrieve information through a single, centralized repository. So any authorized user, at any time, can more effectively keep track of names, titles, mailing addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and other important contact data.

A contact management software package can also enable more effective creation and management of calendars, to-do lists, email communications, and other contact-related activities. Staff in any customer-facing capacity can better organize and manage their customer interactions. Additionally, everyone will have complete visibility into comprehensive contact histories across all major touch points.

Who Should Use It?

While most companies use a contact management software application only to support their sales and marketing operations, the fact is that anyone in a customer-facing department or role can benefit greatly from the use of one. Customers interact with companies through a variety of touch points – sales reps, marketing teams, call centers, help desks, etc. Without the ability to view all activities across all those touch points, staff will be servicing clients with limited visibility into their activities, hindering their ability to leverage new revenue opportunities or address questions or problems in the most effective manner possible.

Contact management software can give all authorized workers complete insight into clients, prospects, and their histories, so they can deliver a more valuable customer experience.