Keeping in Contact with Customers
By Lianne Conner
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.
