From Filofax to Cloud – how contact management has evolved

I remember, around the age of 10, really really wanting a diary for my birthday. This was the 80s, when having a diary was the height of sophistication. In fact, having a Filofax was the equivalent of having the latest, shiny, 64GB Wi-fi enabled iPad.

There was a lad in my class we called Filofax, because he was a nerd, and he had one. I remember it well, it had a colour-coded tab system, and he even had a map of the world at the front, just in case he got lost on his way to Blackpool from, erm, Malaysia.

But we didn’t need all of these bells and whistles because, as 10-year-olds in the 1980s, we didn’t have many ways of getting in touch with each other. There was our home phone, if we were ever allowed to use it, and our home address, for birthday cards and such. But beyond that… face-to-face or nothing.

Skip forward to today, and our multiple device, multiple contact method world has complicated things somewhat. The problem with your Filofax of old is that each contact has not only a home phone and an address, but also a mobile number, a work number, a twitter account, a facebook address, a Google Plus account (naw, I was only kidding), and multiple other ways of getting in touch.

And then, the main problem with the Filofax was that, as Filofax himself discovered, if you lose it, or if Fat Eddie the School Bully throws it into a dirty pool, you lose information. Information can be hard to get back.

Our customers are everywhere, and getting vital messages out to them is no longer a single-channel affair. While we may want to push our official messaging out through snail mail (for legal reasons), we still need to alert people through alternative channels such as SMS or e-mail, which means having that extended contact information available.

Less essential, but potentially more promotional material doesn’t have to go out through snail mail. Indeed, if it does, it often ends up in the bin. These softer-touch messages are better in softer-touch contact methods such as social media, where the approach is less aggressive.

So what does that mean for your modern contact management systems?

Well, not only do you require multiple contact methods within the same interface, you need the ability to bring them all together into one view. Knowing that a message has been dispatched through e-mail will influence the sending of the next message. Equally, knowing, for example, that tweets tend to get ignored by a certain client would influence your future contact strategy.

Secondly, you need to avoid the Filofax problem. That is, if you lose your data, how are you going to get it back? Cloud technology has solved this problem for most, but regular back-ups for on-premise software are a must.

Contact management is all about having crucial information at your fingertips. Customer Relationship Management is all about what you do with it…