7 Benefits of Having a Centralized Cloud-Based Contacts Directory

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You will be amazed at the ease a cloud-based contacts directory will lend to your marketing and sales efforts. How does it work, and how will it help? Read our post here to find out.

In this age of information, everything is only a few clicks away. Cloud technology makes a lot of business processes more convenient. This is especially true for collaboration and coordination. However, some businesses fail to take advantage of the convenience technology offers to everyday tasks.

For example, consider the sharing of customer contact details. When the marketing officer needs to refer a client to the technical department, that person just casually gives the name and number to the team using company communications tools such as email or IM.

Using this method repeatedly for thousands of clients with multiple colleagues may end up in hundreds of wasted executive hours in a year. Those same hours could have been used to find new customers or make follow-up calls.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software helps businesses in cases like this. Plus, it offers a whole lot more. However, this type of software is not always economical. This is especially true when you just want all your employees to be able to access the same contact information.

Moreover, CRM installation requires training and license fees. It also requires a significant amount of time for adoption and integration.

What Are the Benefits of a Contact Management App?

There is good news, though. Stand-alone contact management applications enable systematic contact sharing without forcing you to spend hundreds of dollars a year. You just need to find the one that gives you the best value and provides you with add-ons to reap the benefits listed below.

Smooth Coordination

When a team member asks colleagues to follow up on a customer, they no longer need to send the contact details through email or messaging apps. They just have to make sure that the customer’s contact information is in the shared directory.

Then the colleague no longer needs to copy the contact information from the email and paste it into his or her directory. All they have to do is directly access the contact’s phone number or email address from their device, as it is already there in the app.

Time Savings

Most tools we use at work, be it hardware or software, aim to enable us perform our tasks more efficiently. Saving time is one of the core reasons for sharing contacts.

The marketing team can easily share their database with the business development team by simply retagging the prospects that have become clients. There is no need to create a whole new contact list, saving a lot of work hours.

The same is true for updating an ever-growing list of customers. Several team members entering the same customer’s information on each of their own databases may only take a few minutes for each of them. But add those precious minutes up and you will see that your team has wasted hundreds of hours each year, hours that could have been used in more productive ways.

To save time and improve productivity it is recommended that your team share different contacts lists. In this way, you can systematically organize the different contacts from throughout your organization.

Mobility

Cloud technology has been mainstream since the mid-2000s, and we are still discovering uses for it. For example, with a centralized contact directory you no longer need to switch between apps to find a customer’s contact details. A synchronized directory eliminates the need to find the right person in the office who can give you the contact details. The cloud takes care of it with only a single click.

When choosing the contact management software that will be right for your business, consider the one that integrates with a large number of apps. Then you will find the right contact in any application you happen to be using. This gives you real value for your money.

If you are using contacts in Google workspace, for example, this add-on brings contact sharing into all the Google workspace tools.

Sales Support

Sales reps need to know whether one of their colleagues has already reached out to a potential customer or not. When they have this information, it saves resources by avoiding redundancy on sales pitches. This also improves customer service. With proper tagging, a common contact list that everyone in the company shares makes it easy to identify clients who have already been contacted.

In another scenario, let’s assume a business development team member is looking for new prospects and persuades a prospect to consider a purchase. A sales rep then takes over and closes the deal. At this intersection between the business development team and the sales department, the efficient sharing of contacts and information related to customers is important.

Secure Storage of Contact Data

An unplanned employee absence can affect customer relationships. The same is true when somebody resigns or retires from the company and fails to completely turn over their client list. To prevent this unfavorable situation, it is advisable to ensure that your team shares all essential data, including contact information.

The earlier you act, the sooner you can securely store data about clients and contacts. This will give you peace of mind now and save you frustration down the road.

Detailed Contact Information

Pulling up just the contact details isn’t always enough. Short notes such as, “This customer doesn’t entertain calls on Fridays,” can help a lot in maintaining good relationships with the clients. It is beneficial to all that each agent shares the gist of their interactions with each client. This helps the other team members approach the client in their preferred manner. And the personalized approach gives each customer a feeling of being known by your company.

Not all contact management apps offer this feature, though. Be sure to find one that offers everything you need.

Data Security

Contacts are company data, and a database of contacts is a powerful business tool. Ensure that only proper personnel can access it. For this reason, providing a dedicated tool to guarantee the privacy and security of the data is important.

Moreover, it is not easy to keep track of who has shared “Client Database,” “Client Database_ver1,” “Client Database_ver2,” or “Client Database_updated3,” especially when that Excel file has been attached to emails several times. A contact sharing app guarantees that only authorized users can access the full and updated contact list.

Enjoy the Benefits of Using a Cloud-Based Contacts Directory

Gone are the days of sharing phone numbers on sticky notes and searching through volumes of business card albums. Take advantage of the available technology and enjoy convenience, mobility, and security.