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Contact Management Software
By John Ratliff
May, 2003
In today's fast-paced business
environment, successful companies know their customers and quickly respond to
their needs. To react to these
interactions with clients and prospects must be tracked.
This requires the organized collection and distribution of a large
quantity of data. A solid contact
management program is a tool for gathering, tracking, analyzing, and
distributing this data. Such data
can be one of the most valuable assets your company will ever have.
It is also one of the most underutilized.
What is contact management?
It's a systematic way of managing all interactions between your
business and the outside world. It's
performed through a single database that contains detailed information about all
past interactions and scheduled future interactions.
Used effectively,
contact management software provides a record of the past, a picture of the
present, and a schedule for the future.
Tracking these interactions can
be done any number of ways but here we will deal specifically with
software-driven contact management. There
are three software packages at the forefront of effective contact management:
Goldmine, Act!, and Maximizer. We will not deal with the specifics of each package but they
can all perform the functions discussed.
So we know what contact management is, but what
constitutes a contact? When someone
interacts with your business it is a contact, regardless of who initiated the
interaction. It can take the form
of an inbound phone call, email, a fax, a letter or even a customer visit.
Outbound calls, emails, faxes, and letters are also contacts.
As a result of these contacts, your company will have a significant
amount of information to keep track of. Contact
management software can help you do this.
Implementing a contact management
program can change your business, but it must be done carefully.
Effective contact management requires a tremendous attention to detail,
dedication by all members of your team, and an organized approach.
If your company is dedicated to this effort, it's likely to bring
positive results, but a haphazard approach can be damaging.
There are three key areas where a
contact management program can bring immediate benefits to your company:
Prospective Customers:
New customer leads are critically important.
They should be managed and nurtured as a valued asset.
A contact management program can help you do just that, enabling you to
track leads from start to finish. It
also lets you see which opportunities are in the pipeline, where leads are
coming from, and how your salespeople are doing in their follow-up work. The ability to get an overview of your sales and marketing
efforts can in itself justify implementing a contact management program.
Such details come in the form of
contact management reporting. Reports
can be run on any pre-determined parameters.
For instance, a report can list all new sales leads generated in a given
time period that resulted in new customer wins.
To effectively track sales staff
effectiveness you can run reports that show outbound calls to potential
customers. For instance, a report
can show how many calls Joe Salesguy made between February 2nd and 6th
to contacts labeled "hot prospect." You'll
be able to determine whether your salespeople are making the proper effort.
Contact management software also
offers the ability to see an overview of your sales pipeline.
This feature typically requires the most effort and is often
underutilized, but it helps companies gain a wider perspective on how to improve
their business. Each incoming lead
is assigned a potential dollar value and a percentage chance of becoming a
customer. As the prospect moves
through the sales cycle, probabilities and dollar values can be adjusted, giving
an accurate prediction of potential new sales.
If a sale is lost, contact
management software tools provide an accurate history of all interactions with
the prospect, so the user can determine the reason for losing the sale.
Often you can spot trends in missed steps in the sales cycle or long
response times that may indicate problems.
This provides the ability to determine, and then script, a sales cycle
that will be most effective for your organization.
The ability to schedule future interactions makes your company better
positioned to meet your goals.
One of the largest expenses in
some organizations is advertising, yet advertising tracking seems to be
a
lost art.
Contact management
software is the ultimate advertising tracking tool.
With the ability to run custom reports and set your own parameters,
advertising can be tracked in many ways. It
allows advertising programs to be as specific or as broad as needs dictate.
For instance, companies that advertise in one or two directories may only
need to know if a lead was directory generated, or came from word of mouth. Organizations using ten directories may need more details,
and the flexibility is built into the software to track those details.
Advertising spending can then be evaluated by return on investment.
Managing the sales and marketing process through a
contact management program will greatly increase your chances of success.
A few extra clients a year that would have otherwise slipped through the
cracks is likely to more than cover the cost of the program.
Existing Customers:
Using a contact management program to manage interactions with your
existing customers may be the most powerful change you can make to your
business. It will also yield the
most immediate benefit to your bottom line.
Think how many customer interactions occur each day in your business.
Now think where all those interactions are tracked, if they are tracked
at all. An effective contact
management program gives you a complete history of every interaction. The software can also prompt proactive customer contacts to
get ahead of problems before they start.
Customer service problems can be
coded in your contact management system and reports can then be run against
those codes. For instance, the
software can tell you how many customers called during a given month and
complained that an agent misspelled a name.
Again, the ability to spot trends in customer service complaints can be
an early indicator of service delivery problems that must be addressed. Previously this was done by intuition but now there is hard
data to give a true picture.
There is also tremendous goodwill
to be gained from contacting customers on a proactive, rather than reactive
basis. Contact management software
allows the opportunity to schedule interactions in the future, serving as a
reminder to call customers whenever necessary.
You may want to make a proactive contact every three months, or six
months, or even two weeks depending on your size. This can all be prescheduled by the contact management
software package. There is also a
way to capture some details of these interactions, which can then be used to
show trends in customer satisfaction.
Such packages also offer the
ability to sell new features to existing customers. By using a contact management program to track which
customers are using certain features, your sales team can look for selling
opportunities in the existing client base.
The mail merge features available, both for email and direct mail,
provide the ability to keep your client and prospect bases up-to-date on new
features in which they may have interest.
Former Customers:
Losing a client is always tough on your business, but contact management
gives you a systematic way of trying to win back those clients.
Often when clients leave they are forgotten, but that does not have to be
the case. Using the mail merge
features of contact management software, along with the scheduling features, you
can create a customer win-back program that is handled automatically by your
software.
An automated process can be
triggered by changing the client status, in this case from "client" to
"former client," and a whole chain of events is set in motion.
For example, assume you want to email former clients a copy of your
newsletter once a month and send an offer to return to the service at a discount
every six months. This can all be built into an automated process that starts
the instant the status is changed, and will continue in the background without
any additional interaction until the process is complete.
It is also valuable to do an exit
interview when clients leave and track this information in your contact
management system. Reports can be
run to spot trends in client cancellations and solve any quality control
problems.
What was formerly done through intuition can now be
supported through hard data.
Former client reports can also be
used to track lost revenue. This
gives the ability to get a better picture of the costs associated with client
retention, the value of each client, as well as the client lifecycle.
It is valuable information to share with frontline staff to show the
potential revenue damage from each client cancellation.
This makes a great motivator to increase quality levels.
There can tremendous benefit in
implementing a contact management system in your company.
By capturing current and prospective client information, your company can
be positioned to respond quickly to your marketplace with information on demand.
This information will allow you to spot trends to create and improve your
service offering. A well-executed
contact management system will improve your customer service level, reduce your
time to market with new service offerings, and potentially help you reduce labor
cost by working smarter instead of harder.
John
Ratliff is the owner of Appletree Answering Service in Wilmington, Delaware.
John is a member of ASTAA and NAEO and is currently on the board of
directors of ATSI. Appletree
Answering Service has been serving its marketplace since 1995.
Contract
Management Software Vendors
As mentioned in the Contact Management Software article,
three popular contact management software packages are Goldmine, Act!, and
Maximizer. There are countless
other contact management programs as well, but three that are noteworthy are
QuickNotes 2003 from FigmentSoft, Eden
Sales Manager from Unicom Global, and People from Brewster
Software. Details on these programs follows:
Eden Sales Manager from Eden
Communications uses runs on the Lotus Domino platform and is a Web-based
multi-user product. The software
provides control over the complete marketing and sales pipeline and process,
including:
-
Unlimited
contacts with notes and history
-
Consolidated
account activity and history
-
Integrated
marketing library
-
Sophisticated
knowledge base
-
Processes
to automatically schedule activities
-
Creation
of letters, faxes, memos, email and other documents on the fly
-
Automatic
pop-up alarm reminders
-
Complete
Internet compatibility
-
Full
user guide
Pricing varies depending on configuration; per user pricing is $750.
Eden provides live telephone support on a 24 hours basis.
"Eden exceeded my expectations," said user Matthew Gardner,
vice president of Transchannel.
People from Brewster Software is a single-user package for Macintosh
computers. It is a full-featured
personal information manager (PIM) for Macintosh that offers tools for
organizing client, personal and calendar information .
People
software is $29.95 per copy.
Technical support via email is free.
The
organizer offers plenty of room for details, using intuitively placed contact
management features and Internet integration.
Some advanced features include the ability to receive and send email (with attachments), do
email merge, build email address lists from received emails, fax, mail, link other application documents to contact cards, and
upload contact information to Palm devices.
Key features include:
"I am especially thrilled. Creating lists using filters and
using them to send out mass emails is quite easy," said user Ursula Soyez
of the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation. "I
have been looking for a good contact management software for a while now, and
yours is definitely the most advanced and intuitive I've come across so far."
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