Contact Management: An Introduction

In CRM, all of the ways that a customer uses to contact a business is called contact management. The aim of contact management is to get a single view of the customer regardless of the contact, or touch, point. It focuses on meeting customers' needs at several customer contact points.

Contact management is information that may be collected, maintained and retrieved from your databases. It is at the heart of this strategy that you cannot truly relate and succeed with customers unless you have access to their complete history. However, the separation that exists between departments makes it difficult to see a customers' total value. Therefore, access must be in real time and available at all customer contact points.

There are a variety of ways that a customer can contact a business: face-to-face, e-mail, snail mail, overnighting, phone, fax and the Internet. The diversity in customer contact points means increased flexibility and translates into better communication with customers

However, research indicates that while many companies want to integrate their contact points, since personal contact with customers is waning, there are barriers to its successful implementation.

Contact Managers

There are two kinds of contact managers: Personal Information Managers (PIMs), and Collaboration and Communication Solutions, such as Microsoft Outlook.

Contact managers were designed to improve customer service. It helps your professional staff manage contacts with customers and others on the outside, such as prospects, clients, and your business partners. Contact managers add a user interface to the power of a database, allowing fast and easy access to all relevant information. When a customer calls, a contact manager displays the complete contact history of the customer: proposals, schedules, contracts, meetings, calls, etc.

PIMs, Personal Information Managers, send information from your hand held to your computer. It's a database made up of information from notes, Rolodexes, email, etc. A PIM includes a calendar, an address book, and a to-do list.

Unlike contact managers, however, PIMs do not integrate any of its contact information. Although PIMs silo the same information maintained by contact managers, it is not linked to contacts. A priori, PIMs are not used for contact management.

Collaboration and communication solutions, such as Microsoft Outlook, are designed primarily to help users organize information on the desktop and communicate and share this information among colleagues in a workgroup, department or team. A major difference between solutions such as Outlook and contact managers is that Outlook is internally focused rather than externally focused. Outlook facilitates sharing information and communicating within an organization. Outlook is built on the integration of four components: email, a scheduling manager, an address book, and a document management capability.

ACT!

Sales professionals and entrepreneurs need more than PIMs; they need software, and that's why there's ACT!, the industry's leading contact manager with over 11,000 corporate accounts and more than 3 million users worldwide. ACT!'s popularity has mushroomed because of its capability to manage business relationships effectively.