Best Contact Management Software

What is Contact Management Software?

Contact management software is a type of computer program that help both individuals and organization manage customer contacts, information, and conversation. A contact management system designed to store and manage information, including names, phone numbers, email, addresses, and other related details.

For any business, its contacts serve as its lifeblood. A business can expand its reach and elevate its revenues by building relationships with existing contacts and interacting with new contacts to convert them into long-term relationships. The contacts may include vendors, customers, suppliers, and clients that help properly function the organization. Thus, efficient management of contacts directs better lead generation, enhanced conversion, better communication with clients & vendors, and enhanced sales, thereby ensuring the successful run of the business.

The contacts may come from different channels and diverse directions ranging from partners, social channels, and media to your evangelists. Managing so many contacts from different channels and interacting with each is time-consuming. Fortunately, there is contact management software that makes this task simple and swift.

Contact Management Software is a robust tool that helps streamline the company’s relationships. The software enables businesses to store, manage, track, and control all contact interactions. It also helps easily find contact information as and when the enterprise needs it. This information can include names, mobile numbers, addresses, account information on social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, etc, and many more. For efficiently running a business, contact management is a must. This may be tedious if not taken seriously since data can easily be misplaced, lost, or even buried deep in your email list.

Contact management system serves as Contact Database Software containing a detailed database of potential and existing customers. The software provides an integrated means of tracking the information and activities related to contacts. Contact So increases the efficiency of the business by consolidating customer, vendor, supplier, and client data. It is even an important tool for the sales and marketing unit as it helps them check the customers' real-time status. The team members can easily extract information about the customer through the software. The open-source contact management software can be very helpful in increasing sales opportunities and leads to better management and growth of businesses.

Benefits of Contact Management Software

Contact management is storing and organizing client information for easy access. It offers several benefits to the company. Some of these are listed below:

1. Shared Information:

   One of the greatest benefits of contact management is accessibility. All the information entered in the database becomes visible to all the employees through contact database management software. This can be very helpful for the company since it aids the team members in dealing with the clients properly, even if they are meeting them for the first time.

2. Better efficiency:

   Contact Management Software allows businesses to manage their contact information, preferences, and interaction effects. With the help of the software, the business can establish contact with its customers and serve them better.

3. Choice marketing:

   Contact management software helps prioritize clients and customers based on their interests. Its amazing features, like automated and timed functions, client notes, marketing software, lead list, marketing templates, etc, make the task easy.

4. Enhanced customer services:

   The main goal of contact management software is to improve customer service. It helps summarize customer information with relevant feedback, which the agents can later use, and the team members can communicate effectively with the customers and improve services.

5. Reduced expenditure:

   With so many automated processes, one doesn’t need many human resources. So, the firms need to spend less on manpower. The effective use of contact management software is that it ensures reaching more leads with fewer efforts, thereby resulting in the increase of revenue with less investment.

6. Developed lead management:

   With the help of contact management software, companies can easily manage their potential customers.

Features of Contact Management Software

Contact management software lets users store, track, update, and organize various contact profiles and accounts. The customer details stored in the software include name, email address, phone number, social profile detail, titles, fax number, birthdays, details of anniversaries, etc. By leveraging the contact software, the company can access this information and establish healthy communication with all its contacts.

Contact management software acts as a tool that helps businesses manage customer interaction to make the best out of every interaction. The software integrates features like contact history, contact import and export, search and filters, group management, direct fax, seamless recording, report customization, tags, to-do lists, integration, automatic dialing, and scheduling customization, making contact management seamless.

Some of the amazing features include:

Integration: This contact management feature enables companies to combine contact records with the existing system.

Contact history: Helps preserve important information and keep details of all interactions made with the contacts. The business can access the interaction history to know better about each contact. The history contains details including with whom the company had contacted, when the interaction was made, the contract terms, what the offers related to each contact, and most importantly. Through this channel, contact was made.

Search and filter: It is very useful since it allows a quick search of all the contacts based on different filters.

Contact import and export: This feature helps import information from external resources or export data to other sources.

Direct fax and email: This enables the company to send a fax and mass email directly from a contact management software.

Setting appointments: Helps set appointments easily using the sales database.

Group management: It Helps manage administrative structures used in the organization of assets so that they can easily be found.

Seamless recording: Businesses can record all the customer’s requests through this feature. For example, when a customer subscribes to a newsletter or any new service, it is recorded in the software.

Reports customization: Through contact management software, one can customize reports that can be insightful in relation to the customers' personal needs.

Automatic dialing: The company calls the contacts by dialing automatic their numbers from the database.

Tags: Highly customizable feature helps quickly pull customer subsets in one go.

Taking notes: Storing contact information is just not enough. At times, the team members might want to take notes of any particular opportunity or add comments like when it is best to reach a particular person. One can also note down details of recent calls and meetings. This feature makes it easy for users to add such notes.

To-do list: This feature helps the company create a list containing all the required tasks. This list will be attached to the contact file of each worker. Each employee will then be notified whenever they are assigned a to-do list.

How to Select the Best Contact Management Software for Your Business?

Before purchasing any product or service, it is very important to know what you are purchasing properly. Knowing about the software allows you to make the most of it. When buying any contact management software, one should consider the following points.

1. Cost of software:

   The major asset for any business is money. Before buying contact management software, one should check that the software is aligned with what is budgeted and how much is the company’s purchasing ability.

2. Mobile support:

   The creation of smart mobile phones has placed the entire universe in our hands, which we can easily carry in our pockets. If contact management software can also work on mobile phones, work can become much easier. This will prove helpful since client information can be accessed easily anytime, anywhere, and whenever required. This will allow the team members to work on the go.

3. Scalability of software:

   While buying contact management software, it is important to check the scalability of contact management software. Having scalable contact management software will ensure that it grows with you and works even if your number of contacts increases.

Contact Management Software V/S CRM

People often confuse Contact Management Software with Customer Relationship Management software (CRM). Though both of these are slightly similar, they are not the same.

Some major differences between contact management software and CRM are as follows:

1. User community scope:

   Contact software usually supports individuals. It allows businesses to manage vendors, customers, and individuals. On the other hand, when it comes to CRM, it helps in managing the customers and also offers marketing functionality. All the tasks and activities are allocated between the team resources. It has automated follow-ups and reminders. In the case of CRM, the company works with a common voice, and thus the organization appears to be much more organized and customer-centric. CRM contains more advanced functionality that manages sales, marketing, leads, and potential clients.

2. Software customization:

   Contact Management Software is limited to configuration settings and adjustments. They cannot modify or construct programming logic, whereas CRM normally includes easy-to-use customization tools.

3. Customer scope:

   Contact management software provides quick access to account names and contact information and is often called electronic Rolodex. At the same time, CRM includes much more comprehensive and detailed customer information. They deliver a holistic view of customer relationships throughout the organization.

4. Mobility:

   Contact Management Software sometimes doesn’t support mobile devices or offline operations. At the same time, CRM applications provide a browser anytime and anywhere and have an offline system that may work with or without internet connectivity.

Is contact management software different from CRM?

While contact management software and CRM may seem similar, some inherent differences exist. Contact management software is a comprehensive solution that tracks customer, vendor, and supplier information. It stores this data and enhances the flow of communication with important stakeholders. CRM is broader in scope. It focuses more on marketing and sales abilities and enhancing the customer experience.

Types of Contact Management Software

Listed below are two basic types of contact management software:

1. Software as a service (SaaS) contact management program:

   This contact management program is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. These are mostly referred to as on-demand management programs. Such software applications are mostly paid for monthly and hosted by vendors. In the case of SaaS, the organization is not responsible for updating, maintaining, and installing the software, as this is done by the vendors/software company.

2. On-premise software:

   Such contact management software programs have a single licensed covering and are mostly hosted on users' local servers. These are highly expensive contact management software, sometimes requiring hardware installation and a complex setup. Applications on such contact management programs are installed on company premises and not on the cloud or server.

Latest Trends in Contact Management Software

The niche of Contact Management witnesses trends now and then. So, the business must be in sync with these trends to keep itself abreast amidst the competition. Some of the latest trends in Contact Management are listed below.

1. Interdepartmental availability:

   Today, more and more platforms are being designed based on enhanced information sharing among departments. Due to this, many businesses are looking for an enhancement of collaboration between internal departments.

2. Increasing integration:

   Earlier contact management programs were sold as standalone software. Still, now with changing times, the contact management software is integrated with customer relationship management software, resulting in larger software management suites. Due to this, internal workflow processes become efficient since the number of interfaces the employees use to carry out various tasks decreases.

3. Cloud computing and subscription model:

   Cloud computing greatly affects contact management software. It makes use of a pay-as-you-want system. This system allows the users to pay only for the features they use and nothing extra. It is done via the web, making contact management faster and easier. Cloud computing software help create contact management software applications that are much more affordable and lessen the efforts during installation.

4. Omnichannel usage:

   Omnichannel software easily engages clients and customers across all communication channels. The software can be used on mobile phones, tablets, laptops, PC, or any device. Such software ensures that the information is shared and communication is made with the customers on any channel according to their preferences.