Contact Management Software

Implementing a contact management software solution will of necessity compel business decision makers to consider their existing business processes and how effective and efficient they are. Initial planning and assessment will bring forth serious discussion of these business processes and may lead to changes in how a business cycle is managed.

When performing the initial assessment, questions must be asked regarding the flexibility of a contact management software solution in delivering effective sales force automation and contact center management that mirrors how a business is intended to operate. The contact management software should not become the technical tail that wags the business dog.

Ask questions of your contact management software partner such as:

Do you have a specific business module in the contact management software that deals with my business vertical eg real estate, medical practice, attorney's offices?

We have a unique selling point involved in selling our product that requires delivery by a key individual in a team, how will the contact management software convey information to that key individual and who is notified if that does not happen ?

We operate across several sites, how will customer facing staff at one site be notified of developments with a customer at another location by the contact management software?

Implementing a contact management software solution is a key essential in implementing a business information strategy, however no matter how good the solution it will face considerable difficulties and resultant cost implications if users are unable to quickly adapt to and adopt the contact management software solution.

Contact center management, whether it is a dedicated contact center or a pool of staff already within the business who just happen to pick up the telephone, will want to be able to react and take information down while they are on the telephone in real time. How fast will the contact management software solution respond, can it be opened quickly from wherever they are located, and how fast can they use the contact management software to input customer information as a consequence of the telephone call?

In this instance you should consider asking your contact management software partner questions such as:

How similar is the user interface to your existing business application packages such as the word processor or spreadsheet application you currently use?

What user training is available for employees to come to grips with the contact management software solution and what costs will this incur?

If you are using a contact management software solution as part of sales force automation, will a sales representative at a clients location be able to telephone the office and obtain customer history in real-time or be required to wait, and if not how long will that wait be?

Ask for a demonstration on your hardware of the contact management software so you can see how long it takes to open up, both from initial opening the application and when the application is simply minimized but running in the background.

Contact management software, sales force automation and contact center management are all phrases that are associated with big blue chip enterprise class businesses that have the budget to throw at such management tools. The fact is that this is no longer the case and these tools are available for small and medium sized businesses with a check book to match, however that is not to suggest that a small business has any desire to remain small.

How a contact management software solution can grow to meet your expanding business is a key issue to consider before committing yourself to purchase.

Some questions to ask here include:

How will I add new sales representatives to the contact management software database?

How will the contact management software handle dividing geographical areas up into territories and allocating them to a sales representative?

If I open a new business site, how will the contact management software deliver information to that new location and what cost items will be incurred?

My business has several discrete markets that it operates in, how will the contact management software handle customers common across these sectors?

When a business seriously considers sales force automation it is usually doing so from the point of view of making its sales force more productive and providing a unified sales process that all customer facing staff are familiar with to ensure a standardized customer experience.

This is all very well, anyone can sail a ship in calm seas, but what happens when the water gets choppy? You need to be sure that when a curved ball is thrown the way of the contact management software users that help is on hand to handle issues and minimize customer and business disruption.

Here are some useful questions to ask of your contact management software solution partner:

What help desk facility is available from the contact management software supplier?

Is it business hours or 24 hours a day, 365 days a year?

How much will it cost or is it included in the licensing fees?

Can the contact management software support function be taken in-house and if so what training and support will they require?

How all the customer information is presented will depend on who the user is – management may want an overview of the business and require a key performance indicators to be clearly presented in numerical or graphical form, however a sales representative may need a specific customer history indicating sales made and sales lost (and if so, lost to who). Customer service representatives will require different information than a sales representative, perhaps needing to focus on customer complaint history or contract requirements that need to be satisfied for a particular customer or class of consumer.

How information is presented will depend upon the user.

When effecting sales force automation, the contact management software must be able to present relevant information to sales representatives and their managers that is clear, accurate and up to date, particularly for use in client meetings and delivered on a timely basis to dovetail with customer timescales for the sales cycle.

When considering contact management software to enable contact center management, the software must be capable of capturing information and delivering relevant customer information very quickly and very easily for contact center staff.

Management of the sales and contact center staff will require summarization and presentation of information to allow them to react and make effective business decisions effectively in response to changing market and customer demands.

Business managers themselves will want to be able to assess overall business performance and have the ability to investigate where business success is actually being generated in order to take advantage of such opportunities, while at the same time identify where business performance is lacking in order to take remedial action and protect the business from risk.

Some questions to consider here include:

How will the contact management software handle management set key performance indicators and how simple will it be to set the parameters for collection of this information by customer facing staff?

What default reports are available with the solution and how easy is it to design tailor-made reports with the contact management software?

How will the contact management software solution handle a managers requirement to “drill down” summarized data to get to individual customer or sales activity, or indeed to an individual transaction?

In connection with sales force automation and contact center management, how will the software handle access to customer data so that only those with the appropriate authorization level will be able to access it?

If your business operates from several locations then there must be a mechanism to update and access the central contact management software database on a timely basis so that users at other branches can obtain the same quality of information as a user at head office.

Contact center management may be administered by a third party provider at a different location to the business itself or if still in-house may be conducted at a less costly location than customer facing branches – your bank rarely operates a call center from the same location that it transacts customer business for instance.

If sales force automation is a key driver to implementing a contact management software solution then delivering information to sales representatives located in far flung territories may be essential where they are unable to report to head office frequently. In this case it will be the sales representative home that will probably be where they will need to access and update customer information.

Consider asking these questions when looking at a contact management software solution:

How will the contact management software support remote access?

How compatible will the contact management software solution be with my existing computer security measures such as firewalls or will we require upgrades to our security infrastructure?

What hardware and software requirement will there be to deliver access to the software solution for homeworkers – will we require upgrading of infrastructure at head office to deliver this access and what will be the cost of delivering an accessible solution to remote workers?

Can the software solution deliver information via a web-based portal and how will we handle access authorization issues?

Sales force automation implicitly assumes that a business is trying to make its sales force more effective and productive. Sales representatives should be involved in two things more than anything else – finding new business from new clients and extracting business from existing clients – all else is non-productive activity that a business should keep minimized, and this indeed is a key feature of sales force automation systems.

If your business requires sales representatives to be away from the office, dealing with existing customers and prospecting for new ones, then it pays to be able to deliver customer information to them wherever they happen to be rather than requiring they return to the office to update themselves repeatedly.

With laptops, ubiquitous broadband connectivity and mobile telephones there is little reason for a sales representative to return to base and waste valuable selling time when the client information can be transmitted to them directly or be made available by a web portal.

It makes a great deal of commercial sense to send Mohamed to the mountain and not the other way around, so here are some questions to consider with the mobile aspects of a contact management software solution:

Can the contact management software solution handle web based access to the database?

How will the software handle delivery and updating of customer information to and from field operatives?

How quickly can the contact management software deliver information over a broadband connection or via a web based portal?

Sales force automation and contact center management deal primarily with the front facing aspects of a business i.e. where customer involvement is required. That is not to mean that this all a business needs from a contact management software solution, there is the effect on stock levels and the accounting implications to consider as well.

Many businesses already operate software based forms of accounting and stock control, and the key question will arise as to how contact management software solutions can be integrated with these other key business applications.

Some questions to ask here will include:

How will the contact management software solution handle data transfer from stock control and accounting systems, and the same applies in reverse, how will the contact management software deliver information to these business applications?

Can the contact management software solution handle alerts from your existing or proposed stock control application such as low stock levels or inability to immediately supply a customer requirement from business stock?

How will the contact management software solution advise the accounting application of customer refund or credit and update the stock control application in the event of a customer return?

The cost of implementing a contact management software solution and obtaining some means of comparison between differing providers can be extremely bewildering given the current climate of licensing and pricing differing aspects of the solution differently across providers.

You must be able to work out some form of total cost of ownership for the contact management software solution and elements that will fall to be included will encompass the following:

initial licensing costs

renewals and subscription cost (usually annual)

training costs

support levels (frequently a base level of service is offered but for faster and more comprehensive support you will need to pay extra)

partner costs if a third party is implementing an out-of-the-box solution

You may also wish to consider the opportunity cost created by business disruption and downtime as the solution is implemented and adopted by users. Obviously the greater the time to implement the greater the opportunity cost while a contact management solution that operates in a similar fashion to an existing application such as Windows, may provide an opportunity for faster adoption by users and require less training and support.