What’s contact management, and how can it help your business?
They say data is the new currency. How are you handling and making the most of your customer and lead data, one of your business’s treasured assets?
If you’re drowning in unorganized customer and lead details, you’re not making the most of your collected data. Stay afloat with contact management.
What is contact management?
Contact management is storing and organizing leads’ and customers’ contact details, behaviors, and interactions with your business. An essential tool for growing your business, it helps you share customer data across your company.
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. It can also retain your current customers.
Contact management vs. customer relationship management (CRM)
In the past, collecting and storing contact details was the priority of businesses. Contact management tools were bundled with other business software, so that companies could easily save customer data.
As brands began to focus more on building relationships and sharing customer data across departments, the need for a more robust contact management tool arose. Hence, CRM was born.
With a CRM equipped with contact management features, all your customers’ data are stored and organized, so 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 you what your issue is.
It doesn’t sound like a pleasant customer experience, right?
Contact management is also essential for the following reasons:
It enables you to personalize the customer experience
Contact management lets your sales team add notes about prospects’ readiness to purchase. As a result, you can identify discussion points you must tackle in your next interactions.
Your customer service team also benefits from contact management. Your service team can better support customers with personalized solutions by having access to updated customer profiles.
It keeps your data updated, organized, and accessible
Contact management 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.
Keeping customer data organized is easier because contact management tools also have data segmentation features. Need to find the details about a particular service ticket to help a customer? Contact management tools let you search and find the information you need.
It saves time and reduces the chances of error
Contact management tools search for contact details and automate the data entry so your team doesn’t have to input contact information manually. Nutshell’s contact management tool lets you scan a business card and export the details.
4 Useful contact management features
If you’re looking for a CRM with contact management features that will help you build relationships with leads and customers, make sure it has the following capabilities:
1. Import and export your customer data
Contact management tools can help you collate your customer and lead data from different sources like email and spreadsheets and save them to your database. It 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. Notes
A CRM’s contact management feature lets team members add important 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. Automation
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.
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!
