Why Contact Management System is Important for Business
Nowadays, every business relies on a good relationship with its customers. Customer experience became so important that it overshadowed the importance of product quality. Building a meaningful relationship with customers that’s based on trust and loyalty is a long and demanding process.
Once companies manage to create such a relationship, they want to maintain it at all costs. However, the larger your customer base, the more difficult it becomes to manage everyone efficiently. Fortunately, modern technology is here to aid businesses in such endeavours. This is where contact management systems come into place.
A contact management system is a part of a larger solution called customer relationship management (CRM). CRMs became an integral part of every company’s customer service strategy, and contact management systems are also vital components of such strategies. With that in mind, here are a few reasons why contact management systems are important for businesses.
Leveraging personalization
Information about an individual customer is a valuable asset for every company. Your customer service and support representatives hold such information in their databases so that they can meet consumer needs and help them solve any issues they might have more efficiently.
However, that information is simply too valuable to be left in a database somewhere. With a contact management system, your other departments can leverage that information and put it to good use. For example, your sales department can pull information about contacts and use it to create custom and personalized offers.
This will encourage customers to explore your offers and perhaps even opt for making a purchase. Needless to say, the odds of convincing a customer to make a purchase increase drastically if you leverage personalization the right way. That being said, around 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase if the brand offers them a personalized experience.
Up-sell and cross-sell promotions
Customer service representatives will eventually try to convince customers to consider higher-end products or services. Good examples of this are cross-selling and up-selling offers. Should a customer decide to opt for one of your cross-sell or up-sell promotions, it’s of vital importance that your support staff has access to information about those customers.
A lot of contact management systems have built-in features to help members of various departments share vital information quickly. For instance, if you use Google Workspace, there are some CMS’ including Shared Contacts for Gmail® that have contacts sharing feature that makes it easy to share Google contacts. This allows members of one department to share customer information with the members of another department or anyone using Gmail or Google Workspace.
A good example is a collaboration between customer service and customer support departments or between marketing and sales. The key is to be able to share information quickly so that customers don’t cool off while departments struggle to communicate. In other words, once a customer is ready to make a decision, you must capitalize quickly before they reconsider.
Maintaining a relationship with your customers
Each customer service and support representative works with your customers every day. Over time they tend to understand your customers better and are able to cater to individual customer needs more effectively. However, your employees may take sick leave or go on a vacation, or they might leave your company in search of better employment.
In that case, new employees will have to build a relationship with customers from scratch. Fortunately, your CMS can bridge that gap and provide new employees or employees who are filling in for their colleagues with valuable information about customers. That way, you can maintain that relationship without interruptions that may cause inconveniences or misunderstandings.
What’s important is that consumers won’t hesitate to abandon your business if they have a bad service or support experience. That’s why it’s crucial that all of your employees have access to information about customers so that they can continue to provide them with an exceptional experience.
Improved productivity
Shared contacts mean shared information. Any new employee that comes to work for you will have access to this information once their onboarding and training programs have been completed. In other words, new hires won’t have to familiarize themselves with various processes nor familiarize themselves with customers, for that matter.
All the information is there, and your new employees can start leveraging that information as soon as they start working. Their productivity will, therefore, improve right from the start because they won’t have to learn the ropes first. It doesn’t matter whether a new hire ends up in the service, support, sales or marketing department, the information will be available wherever they are.
This information will help other employees improve their productivity as well. For instance, they will no longer have to formally request access to information. Instead, they just open a company’s CMS, and the information is already there. Even if it’s not, employees can share all their contacts with their colleagues just by clicking on a single button.
As mentioned before, a contact management system is a part of a larger solution, but that doesn’t mean you have to opt for a CRM so that you can benefit from contact sharing features. CRM software is, indeed, invaluable to businesses, but if your company makes do with CMS alone, don’t hesitate to use it.
Emma Worden is a digital marketer and blogger from Sydney. After getting a marketing degree, she started working with Australian startups on business and marketing development. Worden writes for many industry-related online publications and is an executive editor at Bizzmark Blog and a guest lecturer at Melbourne University. Interested in marketing, startups and the latest business trends? Follow her on Twitter.
