What’s contact management, and how can it help your business?
They say data is the new currency. If that’s the case, effective contact management 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 and highlights how you can use it to improve your business.
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. Managing and using this information correctly can also help you 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.
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 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.
Your customer service team also benefits from contact management implementation. With access to updated customer profiles, your service team can better support customers with personalized solutions.
Keep 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 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.
8 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. Data importing and exporting
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. 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.
Make your sales, marketing, and customer success processes more efficient when you integrate Nutshell with G Suite, Zapier, Office 365, Intercom, Quickbooks, and so much more.
SO MANY INTEGRATIONS
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 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 take your reporting to the next level and gain deeper insight into your customers.
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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