UK contact management software
solutions
A contact management database is just
that: a software solution written to let you record information
about your contacts and how you contacted/will be contacting
them.
There are many business
contact management solutions
available from simple and cheap 'shareware' offers, through
to more sophisticated commercial packages and very expensive
sales & marketing systems.
Some are oriented towards specific
markets (such as sales, business or management) while others
are more generic to general contact management.
Some of the benefits of contact management
software are:
Cost. You can buy UK contact management
software for hundreds of pounds (or less - or more!) as opposed
to the generally more expensive business solutions. You also
won't have to pay annual support costs (you might even get
'pay as you go' support) and training is likely to be far
less (or even not "needed")
Pre-defined fields and functions.
All contact management software should come with many useful
pre-defined fields such as name, address, telephone numbers,
note fields, contact dates and so on. These can be very useful
for many business. Many software solutions will also come
with some simple pre-defined reports and functions
User defined fields. Many of these
solutions also let you add your own fields which might possibly
be used for your more business -oriented data.
Ease of use. They can be simple to
use, either because they don't need to offer much and/or because
their fundamental functionality is straight forward and they
are written for a wide number of applications. Not always
true of course.
Good start-up solutions. They can
be good for a start-up business which may want to move on
to more specialist business management software later on.
If this is the case, then it is immensely useful if the contact
management software can 'export' all its data out of its database
so you can transfer it into any new package at a later date.
Large numbers of users. Many contact
management software packages have thousands of users, which
should mean stability (the bugs too often associated with
business management software packages are not so common in
contact software), more development and possibly a user-group
voice.
Some of the downsides of contact
management software include:
Not written for a UK business. An
obvious remark but an important one. If you don't buy UK contact
management software then it is not likely to be written for
or oriented to the type of work which UK businesses and companies
require
Not so good for high transactions
. If you have a large number of records and business then
contact management software may be less suitable with the
lack of mass processing functionality.
Little analysis / database segmentation.
The cheaper contact management software may not offer much
analysis as you would want to have . Can the database analyse
/ segment by any field?
Maintenance. You will probably have
to pay to upgrade to any new versions.
Support. Support is unlikely to be
business -aware and the quality is harder to assess.
Training. For some contact management
software, training might not even be offered.
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