We all know how hard it is to keep track of information in a small business, and the most important information that any business can have is information about its clients. A contact management system does what it says! It is a tool that allows you to keep all your client information in one central place. Gone are the days of searching for numbers on scraps of paper.
To be effective we must be able to store and find contact information quickly and easily. Reducing administration time in small businesses is critical to survival, in a competitive marketplace! There are a number of off-the-shelf products available such as ACT and Tracker. A search on the web will display a vast range of other contact management systems available and many allow you to download the product for an evaluation period so that you can have a closer look at the functionality. All contact management systems provide storage for basic contact details such as name, company, phone numbers etc, but many do not have facility to store and display a contact history. A good contact management program should allow you to generate reports and manipulate data in a way that provides valuable marketing information. For example you may want to produce a report that shows all customers who you haven”t had contact with in the last three months or all clients who have more than 200 staff.
If the off-the shelf software does not allow you to store information that is critical to your business or produce reports that display this information in the way that you need, you should look at developing your own system. The benefit in developing your own system is that you get to decide what information store, track and have full control over the reporting of this information.
To learn more about effective contact management or other ways to make your office procedures more efficient, call Mark Kyle or Lianne Connor on (02) 9247 2555 for advice or to arrange a free consultation.
