Agni Software

Case Study: Contact Management System
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In today’s business environment having good relationship with contacts is the most challenging aspect. Contacts can be customers, vendors, prospective clients, leads, etc. Each contact type requires different treatment - - for customers it can be support issues, for leads/prospective clients it can be information and follow up details of executives, for vendors it can be vendor management etc., and the response time should be least.

Not only the contacts, which are kept up by the employees of a company, are numerous – so are the information belonging to them, which are often kept in different places and have different formats. No wonder that companies may lose track increasingly and that contact information is often obsolete or - due to island like attachments with databases and applications – redundant. This is a difficult task especially in any service industry, since every contact is important. An organisation that manages all their contacts will definitely have an edge over others in the industry.

One of the largest NGOs / NPOs in India wanted a solution to manage all contacts of the organisation. They had different types of contacts like Donors, Vendors, Prospects, etc. This Organisation wanted to handle the donor servicing like information, support issues and also manage activities for prospective donors. The organisation wanted to have a simple, effective system, which can take care of all their contacts so that the response time is minimal.

This organisation has wide spread network and to maintain the track of all the interactions that takes place between the contacts and the organisation was challenging. The fulfillment of requests of contacts with respect to the organisation had to be fool proof. If a donor requested for some information or had some support issues, the system had to take care of people involved in the process. If an executive had not attended or delayed the process, then the system had to automatically shoot mails to the higher executive in the hierarchy. For this a scheduler had to be designed which managed tasks and also trace the activities of the executives with respect to contacts. Activities and task management of the executives with respect to contacts had to be designed so that the system would improve the efficiency of the work force. Different products/ services that would be marketed to the contacts had to be managed. The feedback of the donors which can be individuals and corporate has to be tracked in this system. The system also had to track the cost involved in following up of contacts especially donors. Overall the system had to take care of all interactions between the organisation and the contacts. An effective solution for the management and the end user keeping in mind the individual roles and responsibilities had to be built.

The application of a methodically planned and transparently converted Contact Management System guarantees that contact information is centrally available and valuable information is not lost. The basic idea of CMS is that any information about a customer, a supplier or a partner can be essential for every employee of a company. Herewith, every contact is an essential link between every single element of a company’s chain of value added. We wanted to help this organisation by treating the topic of contact management culturally, organization wise and technologically most efficiently.

A complete integrated solution was designed to handle the challenges, which can help the organisation to improve the efficiency of the work force with strong Management Information System (MIS) with reports and analysis. The system was designed to integrate with MS Outlook so that the follow-up activities could be captured with respect to the tasks and schedules.

Some of the features mentioned below depicts that a complete and integrated Contact Management System was developed for the organization.

Contact Masters: Where all the details of the contacts are captured. Along with this the details of activities are also captured. Activity logs are maintained to manage the interactions between organisation and the contacts.
Scheduler: Activity and task oriented scheduler is designed and integrated with MS Outlook, so that the reminders and task accomplishment made easy with automatic initialising the process of mailing. Automatic reminders and alarm for each activity is also provided.
Cost Management: The solution is designed to track the expense incurred in interactions with the contacts, especially for prospects, where the feasibility and probability to convert them to customers are managed.
Escalation Management: In order to reduce the response time and increase the fulfillment of tasks, a unique logic has been designed where the system would keep check of the tasks of work force. If the executives fail to fulfill the required tasks, then the system would automatically shoot up mails to the higher executives in the hierarchy with details of the tasks.
User Rights: The system has been designed with high security features, since all the employees of the organisation would use the system. User dependent accessibility is provided to ensure control over the system.
Management Information System (MIS): Since the system handles various activities of Contact types, all the required reports and analysis has been provided.

Other features include linking and storing the documents exchanged between contacts and the organisation. The software is also integrated to various places since the organisation has wide spread network. We were able to address all the issues with respect to contact management for this organisation.

Overall the system was implemented in a record time. The solution delivered is user friendly and users are comfortable. They have appreciated the functionalities provided. The system is also integrated with other modules, processes and systems of the organisation through out their network. The tasks and responsibilities of employees are managed in a better way today in the organisation. The organisation is already seeing the changes in the efficiency in the work force and is sure that this system would play an important role in improving the overall performance of the organisation.