Every business, no matter how small, needs to treat their contacts listing like Gold, because it is – Prospective Gold.
To fully utilise customer data and sales leads, you need the tools to mine the Contacts Data. Good Contact Management software will allow your business to easily record, analyse and derive revenue from your customer / leads data. Consider CMS like a machine with multiple outputs – if there are quality inputs with complete customer profiles, then it’s so much easier to provide a service that satisfies. Knowing your current customers and finding new customers are all functions of a CMS.
To help your search for the best Contact Management software, these are some of the essential attributes, the ‘must-haves’.
A good CMS must include:
- Low clicks to let you do what you want to do. That means User Friendly.
- Scalability. Two contacts or two thousand contacts make no difference.
- Every client communication is recorded by the CMS – across all formats.
- Excellent support by the CMS provider – talking to an actual person.
- Smart customisation options, not rigid hard-wired screen views.
- Great segmentation. International / Local, Supplier / Client, Staff / Dept.
- Ability to easily import and export data.
- Smart reporting options across all data fields.
- A simple pricing structure that suits your budget
- Super easy to update contact changes
- Optimized for mobile
Remember, your contact data is GOLD. The business has worked hard to build relationships. So much effort has been spent winning clients and marketing your services. You’ve used your precious time to establish this contacts data, so now when you need to mine and use it – give yourself the time to make a good decision about which CMS to go with.
(Don’t get too caught up in the difference between a CMS and a CRM. A CRM is essentially a more complex CMS. The main thing is what functionality you are regularly going to use. Don’t pay money for lots of complexity your business will never use).
These are a few Customer Management platforms that we really like.
Less Annoying CRM.
Less Annoying CRM is one of the most user friendly CRMs in the marketplace. Less Annoying CRM also has some of the best customer support – speak to an actual person for free when you need to. We also like the quality training videos and the general feeling that this provider really cares about helping the new user to confidently use their platform instead of just a sale of a box of functionality and “go figure it out”. Simply great for contact management. Pricing is also simple and low compared to the competition. Customisation, Segmentation, Integration and Reporting are all easy with Less Annoying CRM.
Bigin by Zoho CRM
Bigin is perfect for small businesses and start-ups. Bigin works well on mobiles because it is so simple and well designed. Reporting, customisation, migration and integration are generally very good. Support is via email and responsiveness is ok. Bigin is the child of Zoho CRM, so there is a ready application to move up to – if your business outgrows the functionality of Begin and needs more. Pricing is cheap for the value, very affordable.
Covve
Covve is a mobile application, possibly your best mobile option for a contacts management application. We think that Covve would really suit entrepreneurs who are always travelling and rely on their cell phone to stay up to date with their business. Covve is great for notifications and reminders and digitising all those business cards. We have included Covve in this list just because it is purely designed for mobile, so you don’t have to stress with those ad hoc screen views sampled from the desktop view. Covve is inexpensive and comes with a limit of 8,000 contacts which is plenty for most business owners. Covve will keep you organised.
Contact Boss
CB is a very simple and fast contact management system for those who know exactly which functions they want to pay for in a CMS / CRM. Contact Boss is known for their helpful customer service and the application itself is easy to use and takes you directly to the data you need. We like the search functionality, the integrated email functions and CB offers good reporting performance and its easy to import existing contact the into the software. If all you need is a way to organise and massage your contact data, CB and its refined simplicity is a good low cost option.
Fresh Sales CRM
Freshsales has a simple but very good contact management functionality. The software is very user friendly and we like their well-designed interface. The AI derived ranking for contacts is an interesting feature. Customisation is good, pricing is cost-effective and overall the application is very user friendly. The Freshworks team is really dynamic, constantly developing new software for business and always adapting to the ever changing methodologies and working cultures. It’s a good platform for small to medium businesses – but doesn’t suit if you are really scaling up and need software that can manage additional complexity.
