A Guest Post by Lilly Miller
Managing all your contacts like clients, customers, suppliers, and partners has become virtually impossible nowadays without a dedicated tool. When it comes to working in a sales or marketing team or being the team lead, it’s imperative to manage all your contacts in a smart way in order to ensure the seamless flow of information and elevate efficiency and productivity. A good contact management solution will simplify this by giving you and your company a comprehensive overview of all contact details, including email addresses, phone numbers, social media profiles, and more.
This information is invaluable to your marketing, support, and sales teams, and you have to make sure that all your employees are able to access it quickly and seamlessly, and use it to enhance their processes. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, so let’s take a closer look at the top benefits and reasons why your business needs a robust contact management solution in 2021.
Build better omni-channel experiences
In the modern business world, it’s important to personalize the customer’s journey and their experience across all touchpoints. If you are employing the omnichannel approach and are delivering omnichannel experiences to your customers, which you should be doing, then you’re managing contacts and customer information across a variety of online and offline channels. This is great for boosting sales, marketing, and support, but it can be challenging to centralize customer information management.
This is one of the ways in which a contact management tool can come in handy, as it can help you maintain a customer-centric approach no matter how many channels you have in your omnichannel marketing, sales, and support strategies. You can easily create a consistent omnichannel experience across all customer touchpoints by giving your teams access to relevant contacts and the customer data within.
Group contacts into tiers and categories
In order to capitalize on your contacts and use them to fuel your marketing, sales, and support processes, you need to meticulously organize them into the right tiers, categories, and subcategories. This facilitates access to the relevant information for every department in your company, but it also minimizes the risk of human error that could lead to a negative customer experience. And as we all know, a single dissatisfied customer can jeopardize your reputation in the competitive online market.
For example, by categorizing your contacts in a centralized location, your teams will have real-time knowledge of where your customer is in their journey, and how to personalize the experience further. This avoids the common pitfall when marketing and sales don’t communicate properly and start sending mixed signals to the same customer.
If a customer is yet to become a hard lead, then you can’t have your sales agents bombard them with offers. On the other hand, if a customer is ready to buy, you don’t want your marketers to bore them with further information – you need sales agents to close the deal. This requires everyone in your organization to know exactly which contact belongs to which category, and you can use a contact management system to achieve that.
Share your Gmail contacts with ease
Gmail contacts can pile up extremely quickly when you’re working solo, but when you’re a part of a marketing, sales, or support team, it can become impossible to manage them manually. What’s more, you need to be able to share Google Contacts seamlessly with your team members and throughout your organization, so that everyone has access to the right information at the right time.
Some of the leading tools around like Shared Contacts for Gmail® easily integrate into your Gmail inbox and allow you to share your contacts with others with one click. You can share your Gmail contacts in bulk without having to leave your inbox, and you can manage access for every user so that you always control the information for every contact, or allow anyone that has it to manage the information within.
Access all contacts seamlessly across devices
Nowadays, we use all sorts of devices to get the job done and facilitate mobile work. Now that people are increasingly working on the go and that companies keep employing remote workers from around the world, you need to enable a flexible, mobile workforce.
To do this, you need everyone to get seamless access to all the important contacts no matter if they are working from their personal computer at home, or their smartphone or tablet while on the go. A good contact management system will make these contacts accessible no matter the device your employees are using so that everyone always has the necessary information at the right time.
Store your contacts safely in the cloud
Lastly, keep in mind that contact management solutions operate in the cloud, meaning that all information is stored in a centralized cloud location, ensuring ease of access, facilitating collaboration, and improving security in the process. There are many benefits to cloud technology, and one of them is definitely a real-time collaboration.
All your team members will have instant access to your contacts, and everyone will be able to see new information and new contacts appear in real-time as they are being updated. This can come especially in handy for decentralized teams that want to create a seamless collaborative process like they were all working under the same roof.
Over to you
Modern businesses thrive on data centralization and ease of access to relevant customer information. Consider implementing a robust contact management solution for your teams and watch as productivity, efficiency, and performance start to rise across the board.
