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What is Contact Management Software?

       Business Management


Date Published: June 2006

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You may have heard the term Contact Management Software being used everywhere, not just in the business environment but also in the home and leisure environment; but what exactly is it, and is it still as relevant in todays Business Management Software as it was when it first emerged?

Evolution
There really is no mystery to Contact Management Software, and in fact its purpose is very straightfoward with a very limited remit. Contact Management Software has evolved and is now usually a part of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, but in its simplest form, Contact Management Software is just that - software used to manage your Contacts (or customers) contact details.

Contact Details
So what details does the software manage? All Contact Management Software needs to include the basics - i.e. the name of your Contact, their address and their telephone number.

Better Contact Management Software packages will build on these basics to provide more flexible information. The storing of address information is an area where many Contact Management Software packages fall down. Addresses can be quite complicated things!

For example you may need to store more than one address for each of your contacts, such as a work or business address, and their home address. For each of these addresses you may need to store a telephone number, and perhaps a fax number too.

If you contact people overseas, then the formatting of the address is important. In the UK we always put the Postcode last - but not in all countries. So a Good Contact Management software package will automatically format addresses correctly based on the country they are in.

Postcode Facilites
Good Contact Management Software packages will include facilities to automatically enter full addresses from just the postcode. This saves time in entering address information, but maybe more importantly it also reduces the chance of errors being entered in address information; afterall if you enter a contacts address incorrectly, any information you send by post won get there!

In the UK we e lucky that the post office has such an accurate and complete database of postal addresses. Not all countries are as fortunate. So if you e using Contact Management software,you want to make sure you e using a package that takes advantage of this information.

Contact Management and the Internet
With the growth in the use of the internet and email, Contact Management Software should enable you to store web address and email address information for your contacts. Similarly to normal land addresses, many people have more than one email address, so you Contact Management Software should have the flexibility to store multiple email addresses for a contact.

With electronic address information in your Contact Management package, it makes sense for the software to enable you to communicate electronically through the same software and good Contact Management software will allow you to do this. However this leads the software into another category of packages, called Customer Relationship Management CRM) software, because the software is now dealing with communications with individual contacts. See the article on
Customer Relationship Management software for more information on what this type of software can do for you.

Advancing solutions
So is that all the information that a Contact Management software package will store? For some yes, but for the more advanced packages additional functionality will be provided. For example the ability to be able to group your customers according to specified criteria.

The grouping of your contacts can make your Contact Management Software much more powerful - it enables you to just view particular types of contact. Your software should enable you to group them in any way you like, by age, gender, geographic location, whatever.

In summary, Contact Management Software is software that enables you to store information about your contacts, provide facilities to be able to find a specific contact easily using search facilities, and enable you to classify your contacts into groups.

And thats it! If you e looking for a software package that provides these facilites and many many more, then check out
Business Builder, a business management software solution that includes all the above Contact Management facilities.


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Comments

Posted by Catherine Gutierrez
On Saturday 7th of April 2012 12:53:45 PM

"Great Info .. Really impressive.Very good article here on widgets.i really enjoyed reading it and i personally don’t know much about this stuff but now i got it, thanks for sharing. "

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