Best Contact Management Practices for Your Business

There was a time when businesses relied on paperwork to store important information such as appointments, tasks, contacts, etc. Business contacts had to be arranged according to names, products, departments, or any other category that best describes the contact information. And paperwork was an important part of running a business.

Today, technology has transformed business practices in more ways than one, and managing contacts is now easier than it has been ever before. In fact, there are tools designed solely for the purpose of contact management.

 

While this is true, things can get messy pretty fast especially if you do not implement good processes to support technology. A failure in the contact management system is enough to bring the entire business down. This is why you must find a balance between technology and processes to ensure the effective management of your business contacts.

 

Read on to find out the best contact management practices to improve the productivity of your business.

 

1.  Sync Your Data

Maintaining contact information across the network is important to the smooth running of your business.

 

The Global Address List (GAL) is an electronic address book that exists on the Exchange Server and stores the contact information of employees, executives, customers, partners, suppliers, and any other stakeholders. You need to implement Gal to Gal Sync to create easy access to contact information across the business network.

 

Remember that Microsoft did not include automatic Sync for mobile devices when they designed the GAL. Yet these devices have become part and parcel of our day to day activities. Make sure that you also sync the GAL to the business smartphones. This will do away with the limitation of time and location since information can be accessed from anywhere and at any time through mobile devices.

 

2.  Keep Your Data Clean

For a continuous business, data can double or even triple within a very short time depending on the scale of the operations. Some of this data becomes obsolete and is of no use to anyone. Having so much useless information will have a negative impact on your business. That is why you must keep your data clean by regularly updating the contact information and getting rid of data that is no longer useful to the business.

 

But how can you determine what is valuable and what isn't with such huge data? Think about incorrect, outdated, and duplicate contact information. How can you effectively handle all these? Even for a small business, this is a daunting task and is prone to errors. As for a huge organization, this is just impossible. That is why you need a smart system that can put all the information together and get rid of the incorrect, duplicate, and outdated information.

 

With a smart system, you can merge contacts by synchronizing different databases and not lose critical data in the process. This will enrich your contact records which are very important to the productivity of your business.

 

3.  Create Contact Groups

A contact/distribution group is a list of individuals who can receive an email at a go. Usually, these individuals have things in common and are considered as a single recipient. It is therefore not necessary to add the email addresses for each recipient every time you want to send a mail.

 

Sending the same email to everyone on your contact list is a total waste of time since the message will not be relevant to everyone. For instance, you have contacts for suppliers, partners, customers, internal contacts, leads, etc. A message meant for suppliers is irrelevant to everyone else on the list except the suppliers. You will need a group for suppliers to make sure that your message only goes to them. Creating contact groups ensures that people receive only the emails that are relevant to them.

 

4.  Data Security is Key

When people trust you with their contact information, it is your responsibility to protect it. This is one of the most important contact management practices because it has a direct impact on the reputation of your business. In fact, the law requires businesses to protect data such as email addresses and names which is not always considered as sensitive information.

 

As such, you need to take the necessary precautions to protect all your contacts from cybercriminals and spammers. You must also ensure that all your marketing platforms are fully compliant with all the data protection regulations. This will help build trust for your business and also ensure that you are always on the right side of the law.

 

Conclusion

Contacts are an important business resource and must be well utilized to maximize the benefits. Businesses must implement the best contact management practices to get better results. If you use the tips above, you are sure to improve the productivity of your business.

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