Welcome to Contactous!
This is a short implementation guide to get you to a company-wide roll out of the system within hours. This document is written for the administrator of the system within the organization.
A secure environment has been set for your organization. An email has been sent to you (ie, the administrator) with login & password to access the system. Along with it is your unique company code which will be required for successful login. These credentials can be used to login from the Web application or the mobile app of Contactous.
There are two routes to implement Contactous.
First Route: For Business Card Capture -
If you are only trying to consolidate the contact information from business cards within your organization (for which Contactous is designed for) then this can be done very fast. You will need to follow Step 1 (Create a contact record for the user who will access the system and provide access to that user) and then jump to Step 4 (inform user to start using the app). That's it.
Second Route: For Building Organizational Relationships and Scanning documents other than Business Cards -
This takes more time as it is like implementing a light weight CRM (though Contactous is not one, but CRM is a good analogy). The time taken is more on planning than implementing. For example, types of users (normal, restricted), custom fields, reports, structuring data by companies & persons, taking notes etc will need to be thought through. This route will involve all 4 steps described below.
A common way is for organizations to adopt the first route and then work Steps 2 & 3 after a couple of weeks as by that time some good data would have got into the system and you as the administrator will have more clarity on how this data will be used.
Step 1: Creating Users
Let's first understand the difference between Administrators and Users: Administrator has complete control over the system and has access to more features than users. For example, an administrator can import/export the data, find and merge duplicates, create and delete fields, manage users and others. There can be several administrators in the system, but a good practice is to have only one.
The users are of two types - Regular and Restricted. Regular users have access to both web application and mobile app. By default, a user can edit/delete the records that are owned by the user. This can be changed in the 'Access' tab and the user can be given permission to edit/delete anyone's record in the system. A regular user always has visibility to all records in the system.
A restricted user can access the system only through mobile app. This user can send the photo of the cards to the system for transcription and has access to records which belong to that user only. Even the search results will show the records which belong to that restricted user.
Users can be categorized into groups like departments (eg, Marketing, Sales, Manufacturing), regions (eg, Asia, Europe, Africa), etc. An administrator can create the user groups from Admin panel.
For every user, a contact record has to be created. While a default administrator record has been sent to you in the above mentioned email, you will need to create a contact record for yourself too. We suggest that you do it first and login as yourself. For every user who will need access to the system, provide the access using the 'Access' tab.
You can also choose to upload all employee list into Contactous using a CSV file format. However, if you also intend to upload some company specific information like department, ID number or Badge Number then ensure that the necessary fields are already created as described in Step 2. Again, for every user, there must be a contact record in the system and the access will have to be given by the administrator.
Step 2: Creating custom fields
While Contactous has all the commonly used fields for a contact record, the system allows you to create additional fields . The new fields can be applied to individual records (eg, employee ID, type of employee, relationship manager etc) or an organization (eg, business registration number, CRM ID, Bank Account Number etc). You can also apply the same field to both individuals and companies. The fields could be single line or paragraph of text, a number or a drop-down list. The data in all new fields can be searched by 'Advance Search' function. You can add a field any time, but it would be best to plan them in early stages of implementation.
This step requires to think through on what fields will be required for your organization. If 'category' is a field then is there need for sub-category too ? Would you need two separate fields or merge them into one ? If you are already maintaining a contact database in a spreadsheet then this step is easy as you have probably already thought through your requirements.
You can add or modify a field later too, but it would be best to think this through before data starts to enter the system.
Step 3: Planning your data: Companies vs Individuals
Understanding this is important and this planning is best done before data starts to get into the system. This section is relevant not only to Contactous but also to all CRMs.
In Contactous, a contact can be a person or a company. A person could work for a company which may or may not be a separate contact record in the system. How we want to maintain our contact records needs to be planned.
What is 'Companies' in Contactous is sometimes called by other names in various CRMs - Organizations, Accounts etc. Similarly, 'Persons' are referred to as Individuals, Contacts, People etc. For Contactous, both Companies and Persons are contacts of a user.
Now, let us understand the difference with an example: Say you have two business cards of Larry Page and Sergey Brin from Google Inc. What Contactous will do for you is to give 2 records of these as 'Person' after the transcription of business card. Depending on your operations, you may choose either of two ways -
a) If you are interacting with Larry Page and Sergey Brin directly as individuals (ie, persons) then you are already set. This would happen if you are selling real estate or health insurance to them as individuals or just maintaining their records in your friends folder. In this case, you will enter separate notes about them and tag them based on your interaction with them. The fact that they belong to a company called Google may not mean much to you, but you know that the company name can be searched within Contactous.
b) If you are interacting with Google as an organization and your first interaction with the company has been through Larry Page and Sergey Brin then it would be better to set Google as a company in Contactous and then link the records of these two persons to Google record which you have set. This has a great advantage for organizations who work through B2B relationships. In this case, you can maintain separate notes and tags for Google as a company, while maintaining separate information on the individuals like business cards, description, tags and notes.
It is important to note that web application of Contactous has a feature to create a company from a person's record. Clicking it will extract the company information from person's record, create a new record and link that person to this newly created company.
But what if you are dealing with only one person from a company ? In that case, an easy way is to just maintain that person's record and add all details of your interaction to the same.
Step 4: Inform your Organization
Each employee (or at least each user) of the organization needs to be informed about Contactous and what the system going to do for them. You will need to do it through your own internal communication system. Here is an example of the email which you might want to use as a template:
Dear Colleagues,
As a team, we have started to use a system called Contactous for capturing the business cards with each individual. You will be able to access accurate data on your mobile phones and it will make us as a smarter team as everyone will be able to answer the question of "Who knows Who?".
All you have to do is to take this single step - Take a photo of the card through the app. That's all. Everything else will happen automatically and you will start to see transparent data within our organization - directly from your mobile phone or web. The key fields of Name, Organization Name, Email and Mobile Phone will be manually entered by Contactous.
The system is accessible to all of us through a mobile and web based application. I have created an account for all of you. I will send you individual mail on the login/password information. Our customer code is <your customer code>.
This is how you start:
- Visit www.contactous.com and understand the flow. Reading their FAQs will help.
- Download the mobile app by searching for "Contactous" in Apple iTunes or Google Play Store.
- Login to your mobile app and start taking photos of your business cards. Do take a good photo as it is a company asset and will be seen by others within the team. The above FAQs give good guidelines to take clear photos. The web application can be accessed by visiting the 'Login' section of www.contactous.com . The login/password and Customer Code is same as that used on mobile app.
- The user guide for the mobile app is available at: www.contactous.com/UserGuide-MobileApp.html
Thank you.
The above four steps are all you need to get Contactous working in your organization. You will start to see results as soon as data from users start to enter the system.
Post Implementation Step - Making sure that users do take a photo of business cards as a rule will work wonders. After every handshake, entering the notes about the contact is also very useful. All the old cards can be revisited and the right ones scanned into the system. More the data, the better the intelligence from Contactous.
Good Luck.