Contact Management Software Review

How would you like to have all of your vital contact information and contact activity stored in one convenient location? That’s what you will get by using contact management software. Contact management software stores contact information, activity (phone calls, meetings, emails, etc.), links for additional information and the latest news, reporting options, and sales and marketing tools. It helps businesses stay on top with current contacts, potential clients and business leads. By selecting one of today’s best contact management software options like Salesforce, Oncontact and Sage ACT! you are opening yourself up to more organization and company efficiency. Use our side-by-side comparison chart to compare best CRM software of today. To learn how CRM software can improve your company, check out articles on contact management software and find out.

Contact Management Software: What to Look For

As you will see in the side-by-side comparison at the top of this page, each option for contact management software, also more commonly known as customer relationship management (CRM software), offers a variety of features, sales and marketing tools, and contact information for the contacts in your database. The ranking of the CRM software was determined by the following categories:

Features
In this category we gauged the accessibility and efficiency of each CRM solution. We took into account how users access the information stored in the CRM software (by on-premise or web-hosted access) and the integrated tools that are offered for connecting with contacts (integrated calendar, email and calling). We checked the syncing capabilities between computers, which is highlighted in this area, making sure each CRM solution always provided the most up-to-date information entered by the user.

Contact Information
The benchmark for this area is set by contact information used by a variety of businesses. Many CRM software options offer more than the standard name, telephone numbers, address and picture. Today’s top CRM software contact pages will include links to company websites, personal social networking pages and client contact history, which includes telephone calls, meetings, emails, etc. The purpose of CRM solutions is to help you document interaction and notes for each client, contact, customer or lead you have in your directory. Have detailed, up-to-date contact information will help you stay current with each contact in your database.

Sales & Marketing
Tools specific for sales and marketing departments are a huge aspect of CRM solutions. Using this software you can organize your database into contact groups that cater to your company’s specific needs. Once the groups are created you can send out automated email campaigns to designated groups or contacts. Each CRM software application comes with customizable charts and graphs that you can view or add to reports to see an overview of your company’s progress and numbers in specific areas. In this category we ranked the software based on the number of options they provide in creating reports, charts, graphs and automated emails.

Help & Support
In this area we look into the available help and support provided by each company marketing CRM solutions. We want to know that the company will back up their product and provide adequate support anytime one of their customer’s has need for it. We view tutorials, online help sections and frequently asked questions. We also put each company's support team to the test by the various contact methods they provide. The combination of each of these items creates the CRM software ranking for this category.

The items we placed in our side-by-side comparison of contact management software are general items that a large variety of companies will need to utilize. If your company has a need that isn’t mentioned in the side-by-side comparison, we suggest you read the in-depth reviews of the best CRM solutions on the market, including: Oncontact, Sage Act! and AIMcrm. Each CRM software product offers a unique interface and navigational system which can be viewed through the screenshot link at the top of each company’s individual review.

At TopTenREVIEWS We Do the Research So You Don’t Have To.™