Contact Management Software Key Features

Contact Management Features You Can’t Live Without

Contact management software applications deliver a full range of features that can dramatically enhance the way contact information is stored, retrieved, managed, and shared across a business.

By addressing the needs of sales, marketing, and service and support professionals, contact management software can improve staff productivity, increase visibility, facilitate communication and collaboration, and help companies build and maintain stronger, more profitable relationships with prospects and customers.

Some of the common capabilities within today’s most popular contact management software packages include:

Account and Contact Management

A contact management software solution enables users to store, organize, update, and track an unlimited number of account and contact profiles, including names, titles, mailing addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, fax numbers, industry sector/SIC codes, company size (employees and revenues), and other important data.

Appointment and Activity Scheduling

With a contact management software solution, users can schedule tasks and appointments, create to-do lists, set reminders, and much,much more. As a result, they can more effectively manage their time and stay on top of important contact-related activities.

Opportunity Tracking

Although not as robust as most popular sales force automation systems, contact management software usually does offer some basic forecasting and opportunity tracking capabilities, so sales reps and marketing teams can measure the progress of their efforts.

Collaboration and Information-Sharing

Customers and prospects interact with companies through a variety of different channels – sales reps, marketing teams, call centers, help desks, etc. With contact management software, vital data about existing and potential clients, and related activities, can be shared among many different divisions and departments. This facilitates better coordination and execution of service delivery across key customer-facing functions and improves the customer experience.

Data Synchronization

Sales professionals and other staff members are often on the road and away from their desktop computers. Contact management software enables them to keep their information up-to-date at all times, by allowing them to change or add information in Outlook or their PDA devices, then dynamically synchronize the data when they return to the office.

Automatic Record De-Duping

The integrity of contact data is critical to ensuring the smoothest interactions possible. Contact management software helps preserve information accuracy and consistency by providing facilities for automatically preventing and/or removing duplicate, redundant, or conflicting data.

Reporting and Analysis

A contact management software system provides users with vital insight about their contacts by allowing them to generate reports from any field or fields within the database. So, users can track information and conduct analysis to discover the critical patterns and trends that can positively or negatively impact their interactions.

Integration with Other Popular Business Applications

Most contact management software packages on the market today offer seamless integration with popular office productivity applications. For example, they can link directly to Microsoft Word to generate batch letters and correspondence, QuickBooks to share forecasting and opportunity value information, or MapPoint to generate maps and directions before sales reps travel to a customer site.