Contact Management
Contact
Manager
Contact Managers are used in businesses and organisations to
manage contacts and accounts so users can successfully
store/retrieve all contact data from a central customer
repository. Contact managers use a database to store contact
data, typically the contact fields that are stored in this database
are contact name, contact address, phone numbers, email addresses,
business type, notes, phone calls, meeting notes and a multitude of
other fields. The contact data is normally associated with a
company or organisation and the contact manager allows for multiple
contacts to be stored against a single account or customer. In
advanced contact managers like Microsoft CRM you can create
customer contact fields so any type of data regarding the contact
can be stored. Contact Managers also have the ability to
categorise contacts, e.g. customer, prospect, supplier, suspect,
business partner would indicate the type of relationship the
contact would have with the business.
The main advantage of using a contact manager to store all
contact details centrally is that is improves productivity rates
for users (time to retrieve information) and it also improves the
level of customer satisfaction because employees can see the whole
history to do with a given the record and it gives them a better
understanding of the whole relationship, it can also show what
contact and relationships other people in the business have been
doing.
Most people looking for a contact manager typically choose a CRM
solution, as CRM software has all the contact management features
built in, however they also offer a host of more advanced features
that further improve customer service, sales and marketing
automation.
Modern contact managers have evolved into complete CRM systems
(an example of a system is Microsoft CRM) and have a range of
advanced features such as:
- Sales Force automation
- Pipeline and Opportunity Management
- Marketing automation
- Support and customer service Modules
- Email or Microsoft Outlook Integration
- Reports and Analytics
- Comprehensive scheduling and calendar functionality
- Document Management