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Does Your Company Need Contact Management?

Are you ready for Contact Management Software?
A contact management software package can deliver significant value and return on investment to companies of all types and sizes. Yet, many businesses have yet to purchase and deploy it, because they feel they don’t really need it or are not quite ready for it. So, how can you determine your company’s need and level of readiness?

Before you embark on a contact management software initiative, take a good look at the way users across your business currently capture, organize, retrieve, manage, and distribute mission-critical contact data. Begin by asking the following questions:

How much time does your staff spend manually entering, managing, and obtaining contact data?
Manual data entry and retrieval tasks can be a huge drain on resources, distracting them from more important activities that directly impact your company’s bottom line, as well as customer satisfaction levels. Contact management solutions streamline and automate these cumbersome and labor-intensive processes, reducing administrative burden and dramatically increasing the productivity and effectiveness of staff in customer-facing roles.

Where is customer and prospect information stored today?
If you’re like most businesses without a contact management software package, your contact data is kept in multiple disparate locations. Sales reps keep their information in Outlook or Excel spreadsheets on their desktops, marketing teams have their data compiled in various mailing lists or Access databases, and support staff uses a homegrown application to manage their information. These separate sources are often inconsistent, inaccurate, and un-integrateable – creating “multiple versions of the truth” that can hinder smooth and successful interactions.

How long does it take for customer-facing staff to gather comprehensive contact information when they need it?
A sales rep wants to find out if a customer has an open service or support issue – before they visit the client’s site. The marketing team wants to know which prospects are already engaged in active sales cycles, so they can remove them from a new campaign that “introduces” your company’s products and services. A support staff member is trying to reach a customer about an urgent problem, but the phone number is disconnected – how do they get the up-to-date information from your sales team?

Without a contact management software solution, obtaining this type of information is nearly impossible, slowing down staff productivity, stopping crucial processes dead in their tracks, and wasting valuable time that could be spent soliciting, selling to, and servicing potential and existing customers.

How do various customer-facing departments share information?
If you don’t have a contact management software application in place, the answer is probably “well, they don’t”. But, we all know that internal collaboration is the key to superior customer service delivery. Yet, this type of information fragmentation can cause lack of coordination among various teams, resulting is disjointed, poorly-executed cross-department processes. Efficiency will be negatively impacted and the customer experience will suffer, which can minimize satisfaction, loyalty, and retention and give your competitors an edge.