Contact Management Utility
Most companies have thousands of business contacts, including clients, prospective clients, partners, suppliers, professional service providers and miscellaneous friends. The personal information for these contacts is normally distributed across various people in an organization, with some staff having the proper address and phone number for a client while other staff have an old address, but correct birth date, mobile phone number and e-mail address. Centralizing this information in a database to which all users have access is a way of ensuring everybody has access to the correct contact information (assuming the right contact information exists in the system) and that data redundancy is reduced.
To add significant utility to a system like this, include a component that allows for contact reports - where staff can add detailed notes about conversations and meetings with the contact, ideally accompanied by a date for follow-up (if applicable). The Contact Management Utility could then display the Contact's contact information, with dates and details of contacts available, too. An added feature would be to have this tool automatically generate a reminder e-mail to the person who entered a contact report when the date for following-up with the Contact arrives. Also worth considering is a feature whereby each contact can have a "single-point of contact" within the business listed against his/her name.
For more information on content management systems, visit www.cmswatch.com and www.cms-list.org.