What is Contact Linking?

Contact Linking is the ability to take multiple contact records and link them together to establish relationships. Contact Linking keeps each individual’s personal information stored individually while preserving relationships between contacts. The use of Contact Linking is found in most contact managers and CRMs. You can probably see this feature in your mobile phone’s built in Contacts app, as well many modern Jewelry specific CRM solutions like BusinessMind.

*Contact linking in your iPhone contact interface*

Why Combining Customers Into a Single Contact Record is Bad Practice.

Many jewelry stores follow the poor practice of recording companion shoppers as a single record in their contact database or CRM. For example, a wife and husband are recorded as a single contact record with a name like “Mr. & Mrs. John and Kelly Smith”. This practice has generally come about as a result of trying to combine the two customers for the purpose of sending them a single physical mailing.

However, in recent times, email and text messaging are a much more common and cost effective way to reach customers. Emails and texts operate at the individual level even for customers who are related to one another, unlike a physical address which may likely be shared. Physical mailers still have their place in many cases and may benefit from combining recipients of the same household address onto a single mailing. However, doing so by combining contacts into one record has a lot of negative consequences. Just a few common ones are:

Loss of the individuality and preferences of each of the customers.
Purchases of both customers are combined into a single contact record’s history and are extremely difficult to view separately.
The customers are forced to share a single wish list which can lead to confusion and ruin surprise gift purchasing.
Increases the risk of accidental “surprise gift spoiler” incidents and reduces privacy of purchases between the two combined customers.
Targeted modern communications such as emails and texts become more difficult to execute when two customers’ cell numbers and email addresses are mixed into a single contact record.
It becomes extremely difficult to measure and analyze the shopping statistics and habits of the individual customers, for example, the husband’s shopping habits vs the wife’s shopping habits.
Increases the difficulty of individually communicating with one customer about the birthday, anniversary, etc of the other.
It can become awkward to manage in the event of a separation since one customer will retain the full couple’s history while the other is created on a new individual record with no history.

For these reasons and many more, combining mailings for recipients at the same address should ideally be done by grouping by address and not by combining customers’ data into a single contact record. Combining mailers can also be done by grouping by relationships via contact linking.

Make the Switch to Contact Linking!

Using Contact Linking you can easily keep your contacts as individuals all while having a clear and visible link to other individual contacts to whom they are related. This keeps each customer’s purchase and contact data separate and individual from others, resulting in more refined and powerful data analysis without sacrificing relationship information. Using the CRM features in BusinessMind allows you to easily create and manage contact relations via Contact Linking. This combined with BusinessMind’s point of sale and data analysis tools provide you with a powerful CRM.

Simple and clear contact linking within the BusinessMind CRM

The Importance and Benefits of Proper Contact Linking.