Best way to manage contacts across various platforms - Proven ways

Introduction

It isn’t easy running an organization where you have numbers and numbers of people and departments involved. If you don’t spend a particular amount of time in maintaining and updating the contacts address book, then we can make out already that all your contacts may be messed up. Isn’t it?

Not to worry about, we are here to help you with everything that concerns organizing and managing contacts. In the following blog you will find the best ways to manage contacts across platforms. 

Select a Reliable Cloud Storage Account to Save your Contacts

Have you ever been confused about where you should actually store your contacts? Or have you ever questioned yourself as to how your contacts are scattered and spread across on all the different platforms? 

If yes, then we have got some best choices that you can consider to have control over all your contacts in one place. There are platforms like iCloud, Google Contacts, Outlook, and more which offer you cloud storage accounts to save your contacts.

So when you upload contacts on these cloud accounts they will reflect any and every change on the devices this account is associated with. Therefore, in case of phone damage, stolen, or lost, you will have your contacts all safe and secure in these cloud storage accounts. 

When it comes to selection and choices, we would suggest an android user to go for Google Contacts and an iPhone user to go for iCloud storage. However, iPhone users can opt for Google Contacts as well. This is possible if they have a Gmail account and they sync their iPhone’s Contacts to the Google Account. 

You can click here to learn to backup your iPhone contacts to your Gmail account.

There are other Contact Management Systems available like ContactBook, Contacts+, and ContactBase that you can consider for proper management of your contacts for your team and personal use as well. To know more about these Contact Management Systems, you can click here.

Clean Your Data

The other way of managing and keeping your data organized is by keeping the address book clean. It does not mean dusting it every once in a while, but it means that you should delete and clear all the unnecessary contacts from your phone.

Having duplicates of a contact may create an unnecessary chaos in your contact address book. When you are looking for a particular contact name and you see two to three options of the same name, it becomes a little difficult and annoying to choose the correct one at the right moment.

In order to find the relevant contacts at the right time, you should delete the duplicate contacts on your cloud accounts first. You can also merge the duplicate contacts on Google Contacts.

To find the right process of merging duplicate contacts you can click here.

Not just duplicate contacts, the individual contacts or contact groups that are no longer useful for you should be deleted from your contact address book. 

This is how you can clean your data from the cloud accounts or even your device to lighten your contact address book. 

Use of Centralized Database

In a business, there exists a number of departments and categories that complete the cycle of an organization. These departments are interrelated to each other in some or the other way. 

The challenge here lies in contacting, communicating, and coordinating smoothly with each other as a department. Another challenge that adds up here is that each department collaborates with their clients from different niche and industries.

Therefore, it becomes crucial to keep everything and every contact in one place to experience an easy and hassle-free communication. This brings having a ‘Centralized Database’ an important thing into the picture for small businesses and large businesses. 

Having a centralized database aids the issue of scattered contact information by bringing together all the contacts and details in one place and by allowing access to all the right and designated people in your organization. 

Segment your contacts

Having your audience segmented or bifurcated into categories and departments would make your tasks a whole lot easier. How? 

If your contacts are merged together under one head or just under ‘All Contacts’ then it will take up your time of manually searching for the right name. 

And god forbid, if you have more than a few contacts under the same name, it’ll take you more than a hot minute to get the right name at the right time. Therefore, it becomes necessary to group your contacts under relevant departments.

For example, in your organization there are three guys named Tom. Now all these people are working in three different departments. Listing each one of them under their allocated groups of contacts can help you save your time and efforts both. 

Now if you want to contact Tom from the Marketing department, you will just have to search for one Tom in that group named ‘Marketing.’ It becomes that easy. 

Not to forget, you can now share a whole group of contacts with people! Yes, that’s correct. There are platforms like ContactBook and Google Contacts that offer you features like Group Sharing of Contacts.

Also, you can segment your contacts according to different categories like Customers, Unengaged Customers, Leads, Producers, Suppliers, and more, rather than just saving contacts of people working in your organization under different departments.

This may help you in increasing your conversion rate by taking the correct follow-ups from leads, unengaged consumers, and more. 

Prioritize Security

Having your contacts updated, shared, organized, and managed is one thing and keeping it secured plus safe is another thing. We all are well aware by now as to how important contacts are in an organization. 

Without contacts it is almost impossible to run an organization that requires constant communication and delegation of work. Since the contacts are so important to the organization, what about its security? We believe it is equally important. 

But how can we lock contacts to keep it secure? Well, you cannot lock it but you can have the right to give selective access to the right people in your organization. 

Some contacts management systems offer you an admin panel that lets you control who can and cannot access selective contacts in your organization. 

It may happen in any organization that certain contacts need to be shared with only certain departments or certain levels of management. Using contact management systems can assist you with selective sharing of contacts and hence protected security of important contacts.

Sync your Data

With an extensive operational organization comes a number of platforms that do all various types of tasks for different departments. 

Maintaining wide customer data and keeping it up to date can be a daunting task if it has to be done manually. Which is why we have contact management systems that offer cloud storage for contacts. 

These cloud storage accounts back up your contact information in all the devices that it is logged into. One change in any device reflects the same change in all other devices that it is synced with. 

Automatic syncing of data keeps your team up to date with latest updates of contacts according to the recent events. Contact Management Systems come with great integrations, where you can fetch all the contact data from different devices and accounts to one place. 

This helps you keep in sync all your contacts and communications in one place. 

Conclusion

We have discussed the easiest and the best ways to manage contacts across platforms. Being a part of large scale business or even a small organization can have you tied to managing displaced and messy contacts in one place. 
To resolve difficulties concerning contact management, we have talked in detail about various ways that you can acquire to get out of these issues. To learn more about contact management and contact management systems, you can go through various relevant blogs that you can find here.