contact management systems

Customer contact details are the key to any business’s success. Customer contact is the heart of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and is considered as the essential ingredient of any marketing activity.

As per data, 79% of customers share their information for a better-contextualized interaction in which they can be immediately identified as existing customers, and their issue can be resolved without much explanation of previous purchases.

72% of customers suggest that interaction with multiple customer care executives to explain their issue leads to poor customer service. So, you can understand the need for having a robust customer contact management system.

However, not many companies are capable of storing a large volume of customer contacts. This happens mostly with evolving companies with a huge customer base. Hence, they lose 50% of customer contacts within a span of the first five years.

What is a Contact Management System?

A Contact Management System is a database of storing details of existing and future customers integrated with a technology to allow auto-updates and features to add new customer details as per recent interaction.

It is a foundation to build strategies for marketing, sales, and customer service activities. A strong contacts database increases productivity and helps to deliver relevant content with context.

Why Should Companies Invest in Contact Management Strategies?

A contact management strategy helps businesses to understand where the customers are coming from, how they interact with a business, and what the best channels to connect with them are. It keeps track of the conversion of a prospect to a lead and finally as a customer.

It records through which channel a person was first approached how the person interacted with the business (or a website), what impressed him/her to purchase products or services and how the person became a loyal customer.

Hence, a contact management system helps to create a flowchart of every customer conversion and designs a stage chart for other similar customers.

Inbound marketing is a branch that focuses on all those activities which are designed to attract, engage and delight customers with contextual contents, and a strong contact management system provides the tool to deliver contextual contents to resolve the problems and address needs of ideal customers.

Unless a company invests in building a full-fledged contact management system, its inbound marketing will not efficiently perform with expected results. Loss of customer contacts means loss of potential business.

Hence, in order to build a database that helps you to differentiate who are your regular customers and who are just visitors, a company should define the flowchart of the customer buying process.

If the company is aware of the process which a customer, customer service team and marketing team would follow, then it could create a robust database that could improve its entire inbound marketing activities.