Introduction to Contact Manager

The lifecycle of a contact is very complex. So just creating contacts and adding addresses, email, and phone nos. are not enough. In addition, you can always use Excel sheets to maintain a list of contacts. But it has very limited capabilities.

So, adopting the right software will widen the scope of your business and help you register your presence in the market.

Like it is rightly said:

"A good system shortens the road to the goal." - Orison Swett Marden

Here is all the information you need to know about a Contact Manager.

What is Contact Manager?

Contact Manager is a database-centered software that stores, sorts, and retrieves the customer and leads details and sales history.

A Contact Management system is a fully integrated approach for your business requirements that will track all the information like notes, tasks, events, issues, documents, and communication activities associated with contacts.

It seamlessly handles all the customer and prospect data and lets your teams stay in sync with the centralized database. The database provides a unified view of all the information, that will help to monitor the work status and effectiveness of your team.

Why is it essential to manage contacts effectively?

Regardless of your business size, you may maintain an extensive list of contacts database. This list will include important information regarding your customers, leads, suppliers, vendors, and channel partners. As your business expands, your list will keep on growing.

However, maintaining such a long list in a spreadsheet or on your phone is challenging. In addition, it will be difficult to extract the requisite information about leads and determine selling patterns.

In today’s age, it will be an intelligent move to adopt efficient software to help manage all the contacts and their data. A robust system will create a proper workflow for your team members and provide them with the right direction to close deals and sell more.

Also, when a new employee takes over the sales position in your company, they will have the information at hand from day one.

Facts: It takes months to find a customer....but seconds to lose one.

Top Benefits of using a Contact Management

Improved Customer Relationships:

While interacting with customers, the sales team can directly take notes and understand their issues with products and the more features the customers expect from the product.

Customer retention is more when the sales team has personalized interactions, and better understands customers' requirements.

These interactions make the customer feel important and help improve customer relationships.

Centralized Data Management:

Contact management will keep your data organized centrally which will easily accessible and tracked by your team. As a result, it will speed up communication and streamline the work process.

Saves time and efforts for your sales team:

While communicating with your customer or lead, a salesperson must have all the information regarding the sales status. To get an in-depth overview of the data, the salesperson can easily log in to the system and check the current situation.

The contact management system makes retrieving, searching, and updating data very easy, saving your team’s time.

They don’t have to go through different spreadsheets or search for email inboxes and invoices. Instead, this time they can use to focus more on important tasks to increase sales.

Smoothen the workflow:

With all the data in one place, your team members are clear about the tasks they need to perform.

In addition, with every step, the customer communication in the system is updated, making it easy for other team members to carry the work lifecycle forward.

Do you Know: 70% of buying experiences are based on how the customers feel they are being treated.

Who can use Contact Manager?

Individuals and different industries can easily use the Contact manager. Let us see how a Contact manager will help each of them:

Freelancers

Maintain a list of all clients and projects
Can create invoices for billing purposes
Helps schedule meetings with clients
Create tasks for various projects

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Sales Industry

Streamline sales process
Analyze customer requirements
Automate repetitive tasks
Makes follow-up easy

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Marketing Industry

Manages low-cost and effective campaigning
Locks the confidential documents to avoid edits
Helps analyze buying patterns
Efficient in marketing automation

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Construction Industry

Manages customer data
Promote new offers through Campaigns
Automated marketing campaigns for new clients
Can share invoices, quotes, and estimates

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Accounting Industry

Store all tax and confidential documents securely
Send invoices to clients and get paid online
Share documents via customer portal
Allows clients to upload documents

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IT Industry

Track software defects with Support Desk
Manage clients' information with Accounts
Set team meetings with Group Calendar
Eliminate duplication of information

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Healthcare Industry

Organize and manage patients' data
Share reports and forms via Customer portal
Schedule appointments with patients
Set permissions to control user access to patients' confidential information

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Legal Industry

Reduce cost of maintaining paper documents
Keeps confidential information secure
Allows only view access for cases
Provides a 360-degree view of clients’ information and communication

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Why should your business use Contact Manager?

Businesses can use a Contact manager for simple customer data management or use it as a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) for a complex sales lifecycle.

A Contact Management will help businesses to:

Organizes customer information effectively.
Provide easy access to all team members to the centrally located data.
Provide a refined view for a group of contacts through search and filters.
Schedule and organize events and tasks.
Retrieve data instantly using the search and filter.
It saves time for your teams and allows them to focus more on critical tasks.
A Contact manager improves team collaboration, making the sales process effortless.
Tracking interactions with clients and understanding their issues will enhance customer relationships.
Tracks time for tasks and customer issues.
Stay connected with your customers with regular follow-ups.

Do you Know: 18% of users want a way to consolidate data

Difference between Contact Management and CRM:

Contact Management and CRM are somewhat interrelated, but still, there is a lot of difference. For example, Contact Management has some basic features for contact data management, while CRM has more advanced features like managing sales lifecycle, forecasting, integrations, etc.

Contact Management	CRM
It manages all customer basic information like name, address, email, notes, etc.	CRM is much broader in the scope of functionalities like managing relationships and sales activities.
Contact management gathers customer details to organize them efficiently so that the teams can easily access them.	CRM gathers data from customers and prospects with detailed reports to enable the sales team to take necessary actions and provide a positive customer experience.
Tracks customer communication with the help of notes, tasks, issues, and history.	CRM tracks activities related to sales and marketing like automation, email marketing and sales pipeline.
Has limited integration capabilities.	Most CRMs are designed to integrate with third-party apps.
Basic features in Contact management are search and filter, tags, scheduling of events, follow-ups, and import/export.	CRM has more advanced features like workflow automation, lead management, analysis, in-depth reporting, managing competitor data, etc.
Contact Management is mainly used by small and medium-sized businesses.	CRM is used by large organizations like banking, finance, retail, insurance with widely accessible customer data.

Must-have features in a Contact Manager:

Search and Filters

Quick searching contacts from an extensive list of databases is a must-have feature. In addition, the ability to create filters with conditions for advanced search.
Follow-ups

Follow-up with your leads and customer is a recurring process. So, a reminder is necessary to reach the leads or customers on the desired date.

Scheduling Events

Creating events for client appointments, team meetings, or conferences in the system will give the team members an idea of the daily schedules for each day.
Segmentation

Segmentation of contacts based on different criteria will help send newsletters, promotional offers, or marketing promotions to various set of customers

Import/Export

Importing and exporting contacts in various formats and from multiple devices is a vital feature. Sync with third-party apps is always preferred by businesses today.
Reports

Customer behavior analysis can be derived through different kinds of reports, that are useful in the decision-making process during management meetings.

How does Contact Manager software help businesses?

Real-time access:

A Contact manager provides real-time access to all the data at any time and place. Users who are remote working or working on a site can access the data on any device and update information as required.

Increased Productivity:

Once the system has organized the data efficiently, it becomes easy for the teams to work, which increases their coordination and productivity, allowing the businesses to grow.

Team Collaboration:

The software brings different departments together on the same page to view the data and collaborate effectively to take further actions.

Reduced Cost:

Since the contact management system has multiple features, it eliminates all the manual tasks and costs of purchasing different modules. This all-in-one system saves labor costs and manages all data in one place.

Improves Customer Satisfaction:

Understanding customer needs and their issues is an integral part of customer experience. Quick responses to issues, suggesting new offers, and providing answers to all their queries enrich the customer experience. This will increase customer retention and improve customer satisfaction.

Accurate Data Management:

With storing data in different places and spreadsheets, there are chances of errors in data entry. With web forms, information is directly stored in your contacts database, providing less scope for human error.

ROI

Contact manager reports provide a deep insight into customer behavior. These patterns help to plan sales strategy and target your customers with new offers and campaign management. This planning helps to maximize sales, increasing the return on investment.

Quick Search:

A powerful search feature helps teams to pull out the customer information from a large list of customer database instantly. It saves lot of your team's time during meeting and when in conversation with clients.

Facts: In the world of Internet Customer Service, it’s important to remember your competitor is only one mouse click away.

Points to consider when selecting the best Contact Management Software:

Features:

First, find out what features and functionality you need. Accordingly, check different options and select one with features that will blend well with your business.

Also, consider that once your business grows, you may need more features, so find out about the software's upgrades and availability of customization.

Security:

From the provider, find out:

How secured is the software?
How often backups are taken, in case things go wrong?
Do they have a 2-factor authentication system?
Can they set role privileges to restrict other users' access to confidential data or reports?

Reviews:

Before buying any software, always search for brand reviews from reputed sites. Also, check for reviews on the usage of software and customer service.

Interface

Is the interface of the software you selected easy to use, or will your team require some training?

Find out whether the company will provide some training, demo or does it have enough documentation to understand the working of the system.

System Integration

Nowadays, integration with different applications is vital for businesses. Therefore, check whether the software seamlessly integrates with third-party apps.

Version

Will you use an online version or install it on your computer or cloud? The online version is usually easy to use, where you must sign in for an online account, and has a monthly billing cycle per user.

For the installed/cloud version, find out the installation process and system requirements to install the software. This version usually has one-time fees or yearly payments.

Pricing

Is there a free version of the software available? If yes, will those features in the free version fulfill your business requirements, or do you need advanced features in the paid version? Also, find the introductory pricing per user for the online or installed version.

Free Trial

Before making the final decision, it is always wise to check the free trials, where you will get an opportunity to try out the system's interface, features, and navigation.

Tip: If you find any difficulty choosing the right software, use our Decision Matrix Template to help you make the right decision.

How OfficeClip Contact Manager proves to be a good choice?

Simple Interface: OfficeClip has a straightforward interface. In addition, detailed documentation is available for Administrators to manage application settings and permissions.
Information Presentation: Our Contact manager provides a 360-degree detailed view of customer information and allows teams from different departments to access the contact database.
Grouping and Filtering: Search contacts using multiple fields and create filters for complex searches. OfficeClip allows the creation of filters using various conditions and options.
Integrations: OfficeClip provides various integrations with third-party apps like Google forms, Google and Outlook sync, Socketlabs, Sendinblue, and many more.
Editions: OfficeClip is not only for managing sales but also has basic features for maintaining the customer database or managing tasks, emails, and documents. For Basic features, you can start with the Standard edition and upgrade as per your requirements.
Pricing: OfficeClip Contact manager is available for free. Also, higher versions are available at an affordable price, starting at $3/user/month with no hidden costs.

Do you know: 93% of customers will likely repeat purchases with companies offering excellent customer service.

Free Contact Manager

Free Support

Hosted/Installed Version

Mobile App

What is Contact Manager?

Why is it essential to manage contacts effectively?