Contact Management: What Is It? How Does It Work?
Technology continues to influence and change the way that everyday life is experienced. It has also had a profound impact on the way that businesses are operated as well. Instead of having a book or Rolodex containing important names and contact data, we now have contact management.
Although this concept has been around for almost as long as business itself, technology has made it much easier to maintain. It is very difficult for any business to stay organized without some version of contact management.
Here, we’ll dive into why efficient contact management helps improve your bottom line.
What Is Contact Management?
Contact management is the term used to describe recording a contact's information and their various interactions with a business.
Contact management has long been used in business and goes back to the days of address books and Rolodexes. Instead of physically writing down, contact records are stored in virtual contact databases or other apps.
The recorded information includes the name of the person or business, phone number, email, and physical address. More detailed CRM platforms (customer relationship management) might include additional information such as customer interactions as well as related documents, email tracking, follow-ups, notifications, and voicemails.
Sometimes the information stored even includes important personal information worth knowing.
What Is The Purpose Of Contact Management?
Every day, normal phone users and salespeople grow their contact lists. This helps them to remember the contact information and phone numbers of important people.
Contact management was originally created for this reason: Because it’s difficult attempting to remember all of the various people, companies, and interactions that a phone user, sales person, or business deals with in just a single day. The main purpose is to help you record and organize information based on your contacts and the various interactions between you.
By keeping an organized and detailed log of interactions and contact management keeps track and stores vital information instead of information, contact management works like the memory bank of a business, instead of relying on the owner or employee to remember these interactions.
How Does Contact Management Work?
The answer to this question will largely depend on the type of contact management software you use.
Most contact management software includes the option for creating new entries and includes prompts for names, phone numbers, emails, and addresses. The software stores and organizes this information to make it easily located and often includes a search option.
Some software offers more options and features, such as keeping a log of calls, messages, and emails exchanged with the contact. Another common feature of contact management software is the ability to schedule and organize meetings with various contacts.
How Can Contact Management Dashboards Help A Business?
There are no business models that succeed without organization. Contact management is an easy way to help keep the various contacts of a business organized.
The number of daily interactions between a business and its partners, vendors, or customers is impossible to keep straight without help. Here are a few examples of how the system helps.
Tracks Communications And Interactions
Keeping track might include a list of calls made or received, jobs ordered and completed, and emails exchanged. In short, the idea is to know who was communicated with and the details of the discussions and exchanges.
Scheduling Reminders
Planning a day’s events can be challenging for some business operators, let alone planning a week or a month. With contact management, you can create a schedule that will remind you whenever an event is scheduled or upcoming.
Keeping a schedule is beneficial to staying organized if you have a log of not just previous encounters with a contact but also future ones. This log helps to keep your schedule from becoming cluttered or double booked and helps prevent a forgotten event that might be coming soon.
Online Storage And Access
In the old days of contact management, losing your physical contact list could be devastating to a business. The same is true now if the contact list is stored on a single phone. Luckily, most contact management software apps provide online or cloud storage, so the data is safe even if the phone is lost or broken.
Another benefit of online storage is that it makes the contact management list available to other people in the company that require access. The contact management information is even more accurate and includes more information than one person alone could accumulate by providing access to others.
Integrate With Your Existing Lead Management Platforms
Contact management systems also integrate with your lead management. These integrations help to sync customer information for easier access. Examples of integrations include:
Zapier
Microsoft Outlook
Google Suite and Gmail
Excel
Hubspot
Facebook
All of this helps optimize your pipeline management, Sales Force automation, marketing automation, marketing campaigns, social networking, email marketing, and anywhere you store your sales leads.
What Is The Next Step For Contact Management?
The principle idea of storing crucial information related to business contacts and customer relationships has led to an evolved form of contact management. Instead of focusing solely on business contacts, contact management is now applied to customers, too.
By keeping an informed log of a customer's purchases and feedback, CRM systems help to improve the overall relationship between the customer and a business. Using CRM software helps several groups involved in a business operation.
The salespeople can access detailed information such as previous purchases, which helps them to find the perfect item to offer their customers. Managers can effectively monitor the job performance of their various sales associates and team. Even the marketing team can track and follow the success or failure of their latest advertising campaigns.
The more you know about a potential buyer, the easier it is to make a sales pitch catered precisely to their needs and desires. Information like that can be precious to any business model.
The Takeaway
Information and organization are two of the most important contact management features to a successful business, and contact management helps provide both of them for a business.
It is easy to forget critical details during your fast-paced day. Using a contact management tool helps manage this information in an organized and easily accessible way. You can apply contact management to customers, business contacts, or personal contacts. The more information you have about your customers, the easier creating a product or service they’re interested in buying is.
Use Dialed as your personal or business CRM to efficiently manage your day-to-day or business contacts and interactions.
SOURCES
What Is Contact Management, and Why Is It Important? | businessnewsdaily.com
Learn Why Your Business Needs Contact Management Today | Learn.g2.com
