Customer contact management has moved beyond digital contact books. Today, businesses prefer an end-to-end system that tracks the entire customer journey and use this information to influence buyers across several touchpoints.
So, contact management is not just about maintaining customer records. It has evolved into nurturing strong relationships with them throughout their lifecycle.
In this article, we will discuss how CRM software simplifies customer contact management. But before, a quick look at the facts that distinguish contact management software from CRM software.
Customer Contact Management vs. CRM
Often, people use the terms CMS (Contact Management System) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) interchangeably. Although they have similar functions, CRM software is way broader in scope and functionality. Let us check them out in detail.
Contact management refers to storing, organizing, and accessing information about your prospective customers through a software system.
Contact management in CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software refers to managing lead and customer records (including activities and interactions with sales/support teams) in the CRM platform. This information can help businesses streamline their sales and marketing processes and maintain long-lasting relationships with customers.
Customer Contact Management Software
You can think of it as an elaborate digital phonebook. Contact management software provides basic functionalities for managing and tracking all your customer information without any hassle. However, it does more than saving contact information. It groups your contacts in specified segments and lets you search for their details easily. Furthermore, it promotes performance in the customer service department and helps build a relationship between the business and the outside world.
What is a customer contact management system?
A contact management system is a type of software that records the contact details of prospective customers. It makes it easy to find/access/update contact details.
However, this functionality has become a part of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software as it helps businesses improve their sales and services by utilizing the customer data and interaction information.
Customer Relationship Management Software
This software has several applications in sales, marketing, and opportunity management. However, its primary function is to help businesses establish and maintain good relationships with both – prospects and existing customers.
The CRM software provides more advanced functionalities. It helps teams manage the entire sales process, marketing activities, and operational data in one place. Plus, it helps in lead management by simplifying follow-ups with prospects. Thus, allowing you to nurture them effectively through the sales funnel. This tool delves into more details, covering details like activity history and interactions between the company and customers, their referral network, and more.
Since the CRM software maintains customer records, contact management has become an implicit feature of it. That said, if you invest in a contact management system, you would be able to access only the customer details. Whereas, if you invest in CRM software, you will get the benefits of a contact management system plus more features such as marketing automation, opportunity management, cloud calling, to name some.
How does CRM Software Help with Customer Contact Management?
Did you know that companies in the U.S. lose more than 62 billion dollars annually because of poor customer service?
That is right! Today’s customers know what they want from the organizations – apart from their products. They expect better support and query resolution and switch over to your competition if your firm cannot meet their needs.
Thus, delivering positive customer experiences account a lot in the success of your business. A positive customer experience can go a long way in boosting their loyalty for a lifetime. The fact is, customers in the United States are happy to spend up to 17% more on firms that deliver excellent service.
Fortunately, CRM software is there to streamline your communication with customers. It gives you all you need to build a strong relationship with customers. It has even helped businesses enhance customer experience and increase retention rates by almost 27%.
How Does the Automation Feature of CRM Help in Efficient Contact Management?
CRM tools can not only help in contact management but also automate communications with customers. It thus improves your sales and marketing processes to a great extent. With automation, you can reduce the chances of errors and redundancy. You can also save time and be more productive. It ensures you make sales calls at the right time, and by recording every interaction, you can go back and analyze what went wrong or what else you can do to influence the buyer. It also prevents instances of prospects receiving multiple calls from different sales representatives.
CRM software lets you set up effective marketing campaigns for targeted customers/prospects. Thus, making contact management more effective.
For instance, you can collect email addresses by setting up lead generation forms. Once done, CRM automatically creates new entries for each contact that signs up. After this, you can segment them into different buckets based on specific attributes (for example, location, job title, industry, etc.). That makes it easy to send targeted marketing campaigns to each of them. Thus, in a way, it enhances your lead management activities.
Remarkable Benefits of Contact Management in CRM
Undoubtedly, CRM software is crucial for almost every business – whether small or large. 91% of organizations with an average of 11 employees use this software daily. The following are the key benefits of CRM software. It also illustrates the reason why professionals prefer a CRM suite over a task-specific contact manager.
Built-in calling
Imagine calling and connecting with customers without leaving the software you are currently working on. That would be nice, right? It is an incredible benefit of integrating CRM with cloud calling or telephony apps. With this tool, you can place a call directly to new prospects and existing customers from CRM itself. It enables you to track calls made by sales teams and analyze accumulated data. Integrating both tools helps you to get data useful in improving customer relationships.
Activity management
You can prioritize and organize tasks and events to ensure maximum productivity. It allows you to create new activities and get automated alerts on events. It also helps you to add new deals and notes and even check past activities. By managing activities inside a CRM software, rest assured you will not miss any opportunity and you remain informed about your previous conversations with customers. It will also help you make sound decisions concerning them in the future.
Workflow automation
Streamlining dependencies and task repetition is yet another benefit of using CRM software with contact management. This unique combo also minimizes the room for errors. With this, you can intelligently automate all tasks to save time and focus more on sales-related activities. Automation means fewer manual processes for your team as they can create schedules for recurring activities. It also ensures you send customized emails, newsletters, and invoices to customers on a defined timeline. It will help you increase email engagement, open rates, and conversion rates.
Timeline management
You can check the progress of every contact from the moment you create them. The timeline gives you a visual representation of the past and future of prospects turning into customers. It gives you insights on points of selling and when to persuade customers to buy more than they intend to. It also helps you predict when to pitch products to customers. With this timeline, you can manage your activities effectively.
Integration with third-party apps
CRM software is a powerful tool on its own. But integrating it with other software can make your job easier. Besides enhancing communication, it can also integrate with third-party apps such as Gmail, Outlook, and more to fetch data from these apps. Through integration, you can expand its functionalities, and need not toggle between systems.
Concluding remarks
You must have felt agitated working through tedious routine tasks at some point. Especially the activities that compel you to go back and forth between multiple systems. If that is true, then it is time to implement a CRM for your customer contact management process. It goes a long way to bolster productivity and promotes collaboration between team members and eventually leads to better customer satisfaction.
It makes sense to know more quality information about your customers, right? So, instead of looking out for standalone systems, why not go for a holistic platform like CRM software that streamlines all your sales and marketing processes from start to end. Moreover, all these add up to getting faster ROI and therefore accelerating the growth of your business. If you are not using CRM software to manage your customers’ contact, it is not too late to start. Begin your journey to success with the Leadsquared CRM software today!
