They say data is the new currency. If that’s the case, effective contact management with a reputable and robust CRM system is the best way to make the most of your customer and lead data.
Without a contact management system in place, you could find yourself drowning in unorganized lead and customer information, one of your business’s most treasured assets.
This article explores contact management in further detail. Plus, we’ve created a list of the five best contact manager software solutions to help you find the one that fits your business! So keep reading for the inside scoop on the best platforms and tools to help your team spend more time driving sales and less time searching for contact information.
Contact management is storing and organizing leads’ and customers’ contact details, behaviors, and interactions with your business. Contact manager software plays a vital role in ensuring customer data remains accurate and easy to access across departments.
The result? Everyone—from marketing and sales to customer service—is on the same page about your customers and leads, enabling them to collaborate, thus creating a pleasant customer experience.
A positive experience with your brand will make your prospects happy and convince them to purchase from you. Managing and using this information correctly can also help you retain your current customers.
Contact management vs. customer relationship management (CRM)
If you’ve never used a CRM system before, you may wonder whether it’s the same as contact management software. The short answer is no—it’s not exactly the same.
While businesses use a CRM to manage contact information, as they would with contact management software, a CRM platform can do so much more.
In addition to helping you organize and categorize your contacts, modern CRMs also include numerous other sales- and marketing-centric features. For example, with Nutshell’s CRM, you get:
A CRM equipped with contact management features ensures all your customers’ data is stored and organized. This way, everyone involved in your company is informed of the latest information about a customer or lead.
Imagine you’re rebooking a flight. You call your airline after its system can’t process your transaction. The agent gives you a service ticket number and tells you to expect an email in 24 hours.
When you don’t receive the email within 24 hours, you call the hotline again. You provide your service ticket number, and then the agent asks about your issue.
It doesn’t sound like a pleasant customer experience, right? Employing a solid contact management system through your CRM makes internal record-keeping and sharing easier, ensuring you avoid these unpleasant customer experiences.
In fact, contact relation management is essential for several reasons, including the following.
Personalize the customer experience
Contact management systems let your sales team add notes about a prospect’s readiness to purchase. As a result, you can identify discussion points to tackle in your subsequent interactions.
Implementing contact management also benefits your customer service team. With access to updated customer profiles, your team can better support customers with personalized solutions.
Keep your data updated, organized, and accessible
Contact manager tools can collate customer information from different sources. Your team members can also update customer profiles with notes from their recent interactions, so your customer data is fresh and easy to access.
Keeping customer data organized is even easier with the data segmentation features that come with contact management tools. Need to find the details about a particular service ticket to help a customer? Contact management tools let you search and pinpoint the information you need swiftly.
Save time and reduce errors
Contact management tools search for contact details and automate data entry, so your team doesn’t have to input contact information manually. Nutshell’s contact management tool even lets you scan a business card and export the details, saving your team time and effort while on the road.
Increased revenue
Regularly updated and managed customer data typically leads to more efficient audience targeting and lead nurturing. It eliminates the risk of your sales team missing leads, which can increase sales and revenue.
9 useful CRM contact management features
If you’re looking for a CRM with contact relation management features that will help you build relationships with leads and customers, make sure it has the following capabilities:
1. Data importing and exporting
Contact management tools can help you collate your customer and lead data from different sources, such as email and spreadsheets, and save it to your database. They can also warn you about duplicate contact information and give you options on which ones to delete.
Most CRMs also let you import a spreadsheet file containing your lead and customer information. Don’t have enough customer or lead data? Let a CRM’s contact management feature crawl social media sites and pull public data about them.
2. Customer interaction tracking
Centralize your source of customer data by using your CRM to track your interactions with customers and leads. You can integrate Nutshell with most email providers so you can view and reply to emails through your CRM.
3. Note logging
A CRM’s contact management feature lets team members add essential notes from their interactions with a lead or customer.
Did a customer reach out to ask about a particular product add-on they’re interested in? Add a note about their inquiry so everyone on your team knows this information and can prepare for their next interaction.
4. Task automation
Automating essential tasks like advancing a lead through your pipeline, sending personalized emails to contacts, and guiding your team through the sales process helps you and your team get more done. With Nutshell’s sales automation features, you can put these time-wasting tasks on autopilot.
Plus, you can sync your phone contacts and automatically collect leads from your website using a CRM’s contact management feature. Nutshell’s app even lets you save contact information by scanning a business card.
5. Software integration
Having your CRM communicate with other essential software in your tech stack is the ideal way to simplify contact management and bring it all into one platform.
Integrating Nutshell with G Suite, Zapier, Office 365, Intercom, QuickBooks, and many other applications will make your sales, marketing, and customer success processes more efficient.
Is Nutshell a perfect match for your favorite software?
Nutshell integrates with tons of software, both natively and through Zapier. See if your favorites are on the list.
With all your contact information in one place, it’s easier to pool and analyze your data for better segmentation and targeting. That’s why you should use a CRM with comprehensive data analytics features to maximize your contact relation management efforts.
Nutshell’s robust reporting and analytics feature lets you track and evaluate everything contact, including seeing how each customer moved through your sales funnel.
7. Lead management
Having the data available to share is great, and how you add and manage new data is crucial. Top-tier contact management software makes capturing and scoring new leads easier, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks.
With Nutshell, you can easily create new leads based on your web form submissions, scheduled appointments, and integrations with other tools, then mark leads as Hot if you want to keep them front and center.
8. Contact filtering
It’s one thing to have an organized and centralized contacts list, but categorizing that list according to different variables is another thing entirely.
Make sure your CRM offers advanced filtering options so you can pull contact data related to specific customer categories as needed.
Nutshell allows you to create data filters to find the specific information your team requires. There are many default filters to get you started, but you can also create your own filters for a more specialized extraction.
Effective and precise data filtering gives you the information needed to improve your reporting and gain deeper insight into your customers.
9. Prospecting support
Advanced contact management platforms often offer automated features for qualifying and nurturing leads, which can be incredibly handy. With Nutshell, you get tools that help you identify and prioritize potential customers, ensuring you focus your efforts on the most promising prospects. This support can include automated follow-up emails, reminders for sales reps, and detailed tracking of a prospect’s engagement with your content.
5 best contact management software tools and platforms
Check out the top five contact management software below:
Nutshell gives you and your entire team a central repository of client and lead contact information in a single dashboard.
Not only does Nutshell help you find contact details, but we also go a step further in helping you track every detail of each interaction you have with your prospects and current customers.
With Nutshell, you can:
Store an unlimited amount of CRM contacts
Access free data importing assistance to import your contacts, calendar events, and emails from any source to get up and running on day one of using Nutshell
Log and monitor communications from your desktop or phone
See the most important and up-to-date information for every person and business your team interacts with
Minimize manual data entry by automatically syncing phone contacts and scanning business cards
Automatically collect lead information directly from your website
Access powerful email marketing tools for personalized brand messaging and drip sequences
And much more
Nutshell also comes equipped with a range of useful features that help you easily track your leads as they move through your sales funnel, automate time-consuming sales processes, and more.
Nutshell offers a free 14-day trial with no need to enter any credit card details, so you can get started with the platform right away and test its contact management features for yourself.
If you’re searching for one of the best user-friendly, hassle-free contact management tools, Nutshell is the software for you.
Price: $18 per user per month for Standard, up to $45 per user per month for Ultimate
Zoho is a popular CRM platform with user-friendly contact management features that make storing and finding contact details a piece of cake.
With Zoho’s contact management features, you can:
Get real-time notifications from customers
See a complete overview of customer and lead conversations
Instantly resolve customer tickets and queries
Communication with your audience across channels like social media
View email conversations and analytics
Get guidance on the best times to contact your leads for the highest conversion probability
Analyze call reports
Log meetings with prospects and customers
And more
Zoho minimizes the amount of time your sales team spends manually entering lead and customer information and more time earning more sales. Plus, your team can receive guidance and updates on when to contact your leads to help you drive even more conversions.
3. ActiveCampaign
Price: $15 per month for Starter, to $145 per month for Enterprise
ActiveCampaign is a sales CRM that combines all the information and resources your sales team needs to close more deals for your company.
With ActiveCampaign, you can say goodbye to digging through business cards and emails and say hello to your all-in-one contact solution.
You can store all your lead and customer email addresses, phone numbers, and past activity in one central dashboard. ActiveCampaign also automatically updates contact details as leads complete specific actions on your website.
If you’re looking for one of the best contact management software tools with all the basic essentials, ActiveCampaign could be the perfect choice for you.
4. Pipedrive
Price: $24 per user per month for Essential, to $129 per user per month for Enterprise
Pipedrive is another popular CRM platform with effective communication tracking and contact management features that help you easily store and find the information you need in just a few clicks.
Pipedrive understands that each contact that interacts with your brand is a crucial sales opportunity that has the potential to grow your business. With Pipedrive, you can quickly organize your contacts into “people” and “organization” categories to find the information you need.
And once you’ve added your contact details to Pipedrive, you can sync them to the deals they’re associated with to track their journey through your sales funnel easily.
Pipedrive also goes a step further by presenting a visual history of all your calls and emails with a specific contact. This visual communication tracking makes it even easier to follow up with compelling messages that encourage a conversion.
5. SugarCRM
Price: $19 per user per month for Essentials, to $135 per user per month for Premier
SugarCRM is a platform equipped with contact management features that help you reach your leads with the right messages at the right time to maximize your conversions.
Not only can you store and easily find contact details in SugarCRM, but you can also store the following:
Customer purchase history
Previous communications with your team
Previous channel interactions, like social media
And more
Tips for choosing the best contact management CRM
Like your business goals, your contact management CRM needs are bound to differ from those of other businesses. That’s why it’s essential to evaluate potential solutions in alignment with your company and operational objectives.
So, what should you take into account when choosing the right CRM system fit for your company’s contact management needs? These are the primary factors:
Affordability
Think about the costs associated with owning and managing your contact database management software. With everything from basic to incredibly comprehensive systems in the market, CRM pricing can vary drastically from one option to another.
Pinpoint the core tools you and your team will need, and determine your available budget, keeping possible onboarding and training costs in mind. This exercise will help you narrow down the list of CRM content management contenders that meet your specific business needs.
Scalability
A growing business means more customers, more contacts, and, of course, greater contact data management needs. When selecting the ideal CRM solution for your business, choose one with the flexibility to scale with you. The last thing you want is to have to switch CRM systems in a few years.
Look for CRM platforms that give you the option to upgrade and add to your sales and marketing tools as you need and can afford them.
Mobile compatibility
Let’s face it—if you work in sales or marketing, you probably spend a fair amount of time out of the office and likely need to access your contact data when fielding a customer call. That’s just one of the good reasons to ensure your chosen CRM solution offers access to your data through a mobile app.
Make sure the CRM provides both Android and iOS app access and that you’re able to carry out the basic functions you think you may require via the mobile app.
CRM contact management FAQs
Need more information on contact management software and how to choose the right CRM for your business? These frequently asked questions may help.
1. What makes contact management CRM software great?
Great contact management software incorporates robust contact management features, plus the ability to integrate with other tools, automate tasks and processes, and generate insightful reports for deeper customer data analysis.
2. What are the benefits of CRM contact management platforms?
There are several benefits to implementing contact management software at your organization, including:
Improved contact data organization and management
Enhanced understanding of individual customers at every touchpoint
Better sales pipeline management and lead tracking
Advanced sales and marketing tools to simplify your processes
3. How does better contact management affect customer relationships?
With contact management software, your organization has the tools to strengthen relationships with customers.
Improved contact management means better data accuracy, ensuring information exchanged during customer interactions is relevant and correct. A deeper understanding of your customer data provides opportunities to personalize messaging so it resonates more with your prospects and customers.
You can also leverage automated alerts, reminders, and notifications to ensure you and your team engage with customers and leads in a timely manner, promoting better customer experiences.
Elevate your business’s contact management with Nutshell
Contact management helps you organize and make the most of your leads’ and customers’ data. With a user-friendly and affordable CRM like Nutshell, not only do you get to organize your customer data, but you also get to nurture your relationships with your contacts.
As a result, you make your customers happy and convince leads to purchase from you. In addition, Nutshell’s fast and helpful customer support can assist you with importing your customer data. Try Nutshell for free for 14 days!
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