Sometimes it is confusing to understand the difference between the contact management and CRM software. This happened because both are very similar concepts. But they have some distinct characteristics that differentiate between these two.

What is Contact Management?

Contact Management is often a part of our way to use the CRM technology. That means contact management is the practice of organizing and storing data of contacts so that anyone in  the organization can access it effortlessly.

In other words, as per the naming convention and contact management is the process of managing our contact’s data irrelevant of the fact whether it is stored in the spreadsheet or CRM database.

crm technology contact management

What is CRM?

At the core, CRM is the practice of managing and nurturing customer relationships in an organization.CRM is much broader than contact management and contact management is, thus, inbuilt in the CRM software platforms.

Here are the top ten benefits of contact management and CRM:

1. Improved data management:While storing the contact database in a spreadsheet, we naturally run the risk of performing human errors in the data entry process.Also, to access any information about a specific contact, we need to search for it manually, which takes a considerable amount of time and energy.

2. Reduced Expenditures: With the processes being automated, it reduces the man power. This, in turn, leads to less capital burn on salaries. Secondly, with CRM, we don’t need to invest in separate systems for marketing, sales and customer support automation, as these functions are inbuilt.

3. Improved Customer Experience: Customer experience is an increasingly important element in satisfying customers and acquiring new ones. According to a survey, customer experience will overtake product and price as the key brand differentiator by 2020. In fact, consumers expect attention and will pay more for a better customer experience.

4. Personalized customer interactions: Personalized customer and prospect interactions help us communicate in a  more relevant way which is very important for personalized marketing.Further, the customer support repository maintains a view into the issues that each customer has faced previously.This gives a better understanding of the customer use cases.

5. Increased Customer Satisfaction: Customer satisfaction is the key for business growth and at the same time, is very challenging for marketers.In any company, everyone can see the full history of each contact’s interactions with the business as well as their personal data. This can be easily used to fulfill the needs of the customer.

6. Improved Productivity: CRM also automates tons of manual processes which increases the team productivity.For example, special features like online appointment scheduling and forms, automate the entire scheduling and data entry process.

7. Deeper Insight into Customers: Contact Management and CRM software allow us to store the loads of personal information of each and every customer.As a result, as we gradually accumulate more data about them, our understanding of the customer becomes more accurate.

8. Long lasting customer relationships: Both of these tools allow us to store extensive amount of data about every single customer.
This includes the demographic data like name, age, email, location, industry, and much more.It also tracks and stores behavioral data such as whether the customer clicks and opens an email, visits the website, downloads content, subscribes to our mail list, etc.

9. Data Driven Decision Making: Contact management and CRM software also provide extensive CRM reporting, metrics and analysis. For instance, the metrics like revenue predictions, sales funnel analysis and campaign performance metrics, help the company leaders to make data-driven decisions. A CRM solution with a customizable dashboard makes accessing these metrics and making data-driven decisions super easy.

10. Better alignment and collaboration: It is very challenging to align the team’s efforts in a particular direction, especially in sales and marketing.The contact management and CRM software bridge this gap by giving everyone in the company a 360-degree view of each customer and prospect interaction along with their personal data.