A company directory comes in different forms. Usually, you have your regularly accessed phone numbers in a paper posted within your line of sight. Anyhow, this is the digital age, everything can now be paperless.
Gone are the days when there is a paper taped somewhere around your desk about the contact details of whom you interact with from other departments. Or is it? Maybe now your workplace has a shared spreadsheet file where you can look it up if you haven’t memorized it yet. Otherwise, you know who to bother when you can’t find the replacement employee’s contact details. Having a company directory directly accessible from your mobile phone or desktop saves you and everyone in your organization from all these nuances.
1. Efficient Communication
Having the company directory app means that you no longer need to search for the contact details of your team members. No need to input the phone number as you see it from the note on the wall or copy/paste it from previous transactions.
The contact details of everyone in the company appear in the autocomplete form on the recipient field of your preferred messaging app. You are no longer asking around for the number of the new guy.
2. Improve Onboarding
Speaking of a new guy, having a company directory eases his adjustment to the workplace. He can easily see everyone in the organization. He can reach out easily to anyone if he has the right clearance.
A working company directory shortens the warming-up period of new employees. His productivity increases as he uses his time doing the actual work rather than asking around who does what in your company.
3. Saves time
Quoting Paul J. Meyer, one of the world’s authorities in personal and professional development: “Most time is wasted, not in hours, but in minutes. A bucket with a small hole in the bottom gets just as empty as a bucket that is deliberately kicked over.”
Searching for an email address may only take seconds. Unfortunately, repeatedly doing this action would accumulate hours in a year. A reliable contact management system eliminates this unproductive time.
4. Access the company directory anywhere
Take this scenario: You found a leak in the pantry. It is more convenient to email the maintenance crew right from your mobile phone rather than going to your desktop. There can be dozens of reasons for you to forget that tiny matter. A direct email instead of just a memo on your phone saves you time and effort.
5. Support sales
The marketing and sales team can easily share the customer list with a good contact management app. This does not necessarily mean a CRM. CRM seats can be pricey. The onboarding costs and other expenses are other ledger entries.
One can create a folder named “Leads” and “Clients” on the company directory which will be accessible only by the sales and marketing departments. Importantly, you should secure the said folders. You don’t want everyone to access these types of contacts.
Consequently, your company’s ability to share contacts makes you save from CRM seat monthly payments. Only those who truly need features like forecasting and data analysis will be availing the CRM. The rest who can do with only contact sharing need not be onboard the CRM.
6. Secure the communication
In relation to the subject of securing the folder as mentioned above, choose the contact management app that lets you set permissions. Permissions are important to prevent unauthorized access to certain contact groups.
For example, admins do not need to access the customer’s list. Hence, you must set the “Leads” and “Clients” to be restricted to only the marketing and sales departments.
As for the internal group, you can also set the C-level contact details visible only to the managers if the first requires to. This will prevent bypassing the company hierarchy. However, some managers from SMEs don’t mind getting ideas from file employees.
7. Share more than contact details
Employees can easily do the search by name, branch location, department, or job title. The company directory can have these details filed under the contact. This gives everyone knowledge about the company organization.
Some contact management app even has a note feature and tag your colleagues about something you wrote. You can use this feature to add some comments. You must do this with the permission of the person involved of course. Examples of notes are “she is vegan” or “he is a Jew.” Certainly, these short notes can remind people of the general preferences of their colleague’s wants and needs.
8. Guards your data
Select the company directory software that is GDPR compliant or any other standards that uphold data privacy. This is important so that you know your data will not be hacked or used by third parties.
9. Protected transfer
When an employee named Cora leaves the company, she may no longer be required to transfer her contact list to her successor, Lalaine. The contact manager only needs to cancel Cora’s access and assign Lalaine to it.
This is practical especially if Cora went AWOL. As a result, the admin no longer needs to find Cora, at least for the client list that Cora is talking with. In turn, Cora can no longer access the said list immediately. The admin need not worry about misplaced files or lack of access to Cora’s backlogs.
10. Updated company directory
Some companies have a big turnover of employees. Maintaining a shared spreadsheet file with the contact details can be painstaking. It would be time-consuming to update the contact list for every individual contact database.
Having a centralized company directory means only one update is essential. The rest of the organization will have the same updated information on their shared contact list.
This eliminates the hassle of not knowing the number of the latest admin who takes care of leave filing. On the other hand, you may casually know that Marcelo has been promoted even if he does not disclose it. Your team can ask for him to sponsor a karaoke night as the celebration!
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