How lovely would it be if your company never let a contact (be it a lead, customer, or job candidate) fall through the cracks? If you followed up with all contacts at the right time? If you could access information on contacts anywhere, any time? Had your contacts organized and easy to find? And kept a log of all the emails, conversations, and interactions? Contact management is how you make this happen.

What is Contact Management?

A contact management system (CMS) refers to a program that allows you to easily store and locate contact information, such as names, telephone numbers, and addresses. A CMS can help your business overcome the challenges associated with information fragmentation and inconsistency.

A great CMS can significantly enhance all your contacts interactions and help regarding email correspondence, marketing operations, service delivery, and sales cycles’ productivity. It does this by helping you create real-time, reliable, and easy-to-access information about your present and prospective customers and job candidates.

Departments within your organization that deal with job candidates (human resource and help desks) and customers (marketing, sales, and customer service) can collaborate and coordinate cross-functional activities using a CMS.

Features of a Good Contact Management System

CMSs vary depending on the software provider. However, most have similar basic foundational features that help your business improve its communication with contacts. The best CMS for your business fits into how you work. A small business with a handful of employees will have vastly different CMS requirements from a multinational with multiple offices worldwide.

Below are the features of the best CMS for your business.

1. Cloud-Based

With cloud-based software, you store all the data in your contact manager online. It allows employees to access the data and add to it remotely. It is perfect for recruiting teams whose members work remotely or from multiple locations.

Recruiters can check a prospect’s entry from their smartphone while on the way to an interview through the contact management app. Additionally, recruitment and selection teams in the HR department can bring up information on existing job candidates when they get in touch.

Cloud-based capability means that the system reflects all entries’ updates in real-time, ensuring that all departments work from the same data.

Can you imagine losing all your contacts information that has taken you months or years to build? A cloud-based CMS makes it nearly impossible for that to happen. Papers do not get lost, and spreadsheets don’t close without saving. Once it is on the cloud, it’s hard to lose and easy to access.

Other benefits of a cloud-based CMS include:

  • Access to data in real-time and from anywhere

  • Integration of social information

  • Integration of job prospects and customer information from other sources

  • Smart collaboration with colleagues

2. Integrations

Often, you need to pull information from various sources to get an accurate picture of job candidates. While you could manually add the data, the best CMS will automatically integrate with other tools to pull data from these sources. For instance, you can:

  • Integrate with your email prospects to automatically add new contacts

  • Integrate with other job recruitment agencies to see a candidate’s work history from within the dashboard

  • Integrate with social media sites when reviewing and shortlisting potential job candidates

3. Easy-to-Use Dashboard

The CMS dashboard should be easy-to-use to increase its adoption amongst your business or organization’s relevant departments. A not-so-user-friendly software will put off recruiters and selection teams from using it or prevent them from utilizing its benefits fully.

4. Track Data

Probably the primary function of a CMS is tracking contact data. Details include names, addresses, calls, tasks, notes, and job orders. You can also save email and verbal communications, making it easy to see who you had talked to as well as what you talked about and when you spoke to them.

The best part is organizing everything in software instead of being lost in piles of sticky notes or random spreadsheets saved on someone’s hard drive.

5. Review Information

A CMS keeps an organized history of all past interviews, conversations, follow-ups, and other records. The ability to review information helps you build an applicant or talent pool for all your top job candidates. You can later successfully review the contacts down the line.

6. Automate Reminders

A CMS helps you automate reminders, so you no longer need to use sticky notes on your computer screen or remember to add reminders to your phone.

CMS vs. CRM

CMS and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) assist you in organizing your contacts. However, a CRM typically has a broader scope in terms of its functionality.

Contact management first evolved from Filofax and Rolodex systems into desktop-based software and email contacts with built-in management tools. It became a database of names, phone numbers, addresses, and notes.

However, over time, the business environment evolved from merely keeping a database of contacts to establishing and nurturing relationships with customers. Hence, the move towards systems and processes that can track the entire customer journey. Therefore, CRM systems have integrated CMS tools and programs to track everything from contacts, customers, and leads to marketing campaigns and team performances.

Wrapping Up

Contact management refers to how organizations and businesses store and manage clients, partners, customers, job candidates, and other stakeholders’ contact information. With a CMS, the process of entering a contact’s information, storing it, and retrieving it is entirely consolidated and fully automated. Any authorized user can effectively keep track of information about prospects and job candidates.

If you are wary of missing out on top job candidates and other opportunities because you failed to call someone back or didn’t follow up on time, then CMS is the perfect solution.

Why Choose Interseller?

Interseller offers a superior email platform that helps you automate outreach programs and enables you to connect with ideal candidates or re-engage later. Make your team more productive and request a demo today, and find out how to elevate your acquisition process.