For a company, it starts with initiating contact with a lead who takes interests in its products. It should be noted that a lead is not a potential customer but is the one who shows interest and has the potential to purchase the company’s products. As the business grows, more leads are generated, which creates a complicated situation which if not appropriately managed results in leads leakage. A lead is converted into contact when it establishes direct two-way communication with the company. Hence, to turn lead into a contact, it is essential to manage leads properly.
In current competitive markets, many business ventures are in continuous practice of growing their potential customers, and it leads to a stage where it becomes difficult to keep track of every customer, and thus it leads to the customer’s leakage, missed follow-ups and no customer commitment. Subsequently, it has been reported that an average business organization tends to lose 50% of its customers within a business cycle of five years. Thus, it has become a necessity to keep track of all customers and their needs which changes time to time; however, it is a complex task to manage a large number of customers while also maintaining records. Hence, it creates a need for an automated system which timely keeps and updates customer records, and these automated systems are termed as Contact Management System.
Contact Management System provides a stable environment to keep track and update all customer information in its database. Contact Management System, or CMS allows the organization to retrieve data of particular customer at any time while also updating it timely. Furthermore, this database helps the company to strategically design their policies and keep themselves up with customer requirements. Secondly, the organization can also search for possibilities to review its sales strategy by examining the present position of the customer by handling connections. In this way, the business achieves a two-part goal by doing so.
The benefits of having contact management systems are;

• Maintaining more efficient and less overhead customer records and using them for maximum customer satisfaction.
• With many clients and candidates, the company have long-term relationships. A company needs a running history of with whom the company is dealing with because of the long-term nature of recruiting communications. Thus, Contact Management Systems helps to look over past communication resulting in more strengthening mutual relationship.
• CMS helps to assess company records and customer’s approaches which allows the company to promote new offers, resulting increase in sells.
• Alongside keeping track of customer data, CMS can also work as a feedback system, allowing customers to give their input about its products which helps the company to evaluate itself,

Concluding all, it has become an utmost necessity for a company to build a strong relationship with customers which cannot be done efficiently without having an automated system like contact management system. Meeting with customer needs should be the top priority of a company thus it is highly encouraged for a company to maintain an automated contact management system which in turns help to gain customer support and increases chances of company’s growth.

Clarity:

Don’t make readers of your schedule guess or presume. Be sure that the activity name contains both a noun and a verb (action taken). Use good English where possible in space allowed. Have someone else read the name and tell you what it means to them.

Uniqueness:

All names must be unique, adding a location is one way to provide uniqueness. This adds to the clarity.

Understandable (No Matter The Layout Organization):

Do not rely on the current layout’s organization and group title to substitute for distinct identification of an activity. As soon as you reorganize/sort your layout activities become disassociated from original group titles (headers). This plays into the uniqueness factor.

Use of Acronyms:

The problem with using acronyms or abbreviations is that they may well be misunderstood, based on user experience. If the acronym is either an industry standard or an everyday common acronym it may well be usable. But, avoid when possible.

USACE Special Rules

The USACE uses a special import system that creates a standard data exchange system that only parses the first 30 characters of an activity name. This truncation creates essentially a different name. Therefore it is important to smartly use the first 30 characters to avoid loss of uniqueness and loss of clarity, which could cause rejection.