28 Jun 10 Contact Management Software – An Indispensable Tool

If you were a very large company in the nineteen seventies you might have invested in The computer system. In those days this usually meant either a minicomputer or mainframe. You might have built into that bespoke software system some facilities of the function of contact management software. It would be limited, cumbersome and very expensive.

With the arrival of the PC widely available contact management software for use with it was somewhere on the distant horizon. The PC and its very survival needed killer applications and this was not one of them. At the beginning the killer applications were Word processor software and spreadsheet software. Effectively this meant that anyone who bought a PC in those days wanted to use it primarily for those two purposes.

In the context of what we now know and with the clear vision of hindsight, this is amusing. It’s amusing, though, only because we are now fully aware that the world of the PC is swarming with “killer applications”. Now users might well justify the purchase of the relatively inexpensive hardware on the basis of one such application, even though more than likely they have many applications on their PC that they find just about indispensable. In terms of the business world, the phrase could be used in a converse sort of way. In other words to mean any software, without which the organization might well die or be killed.

Could any library work efficiently nowadays without a sophisticated database system? Could any accounts department today function without accounting software? Could any marketing department do their job efficiently without the use of presentation software, other graphics software and perhaps page layout software?

About fifteen or twenty years ago, depending on which applications you refer to, the idea of writing specific applications to handle contact management came on the agenda . It’s not surprising because managing large number of contacts and their history and interaction is a fairly ideal job for a computer program. It’s not surprising also that contact management software became so popular, since a lot of sales and marketing departments use it. And since sales and marketing departments are by definition, the prime revenue generators of any business they often get particular attention.

Contact Management Software keeps details records of each contact. These records include obvious data like name, address, phone numbers e-mail address etc. It also keeps a record of all interaction with that contact. This means a record of telephone conversations, correspondence (e-mails, letters, etc) and related notes. The software keeps detailed history of everything including meetings. This is crucial it you want to trawl back, maybe years, to see, for example, when some pivotal event took place, like an important conversation, who said what during it; or when a certain e-mail was sent and what exactly is contained.

Not alone does the software allow this kind of history and its research, it also allows the generation of reports related to any aspect of the contact database. This is possible because most contact management software is built on the structure of a relational database. So the most complex extraction of information is facilitated via a clear user-friendly interface.

Even for small companies the number of contacts can grow to a very large number. Without such a system this would be very difficult to manage efficiently. And one of the other great features of content management software is its reminder function. For any time into the future it can set reminders, for tasks, meetings and phone calls. Coming up to the date of such events it can produce an audible or on screen reminder on the user’s computer. As well as that it can be set up to issue an e-mail to all other people involved in the forthcoming event.

All these facilities are extremely useful and close to indispensable. However, many users maintain that the feature they could not really operate without is to do with mailing lists. The capability of contact management software to generate mailing lists is powerful and of great value particularly in the sales context. A user can tell the system to extract a list of all contacts in particularly categories. A category could be the contacts in a particular town. Another category might be all contacts in a particular industry. The contact management software can then be instructed to send a e-mail to all of these. Alternatively it can be set up to produce a letter for printing for posting. In such circumstances the software may also print the envelopes.

Learn more about contact management software. Stop by Andy Zhang’s site where you can find out all about contact manager and what it can do for you.

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