ContactZilla, the simple - and free – social CRM tool from SimpleWeb, is out and in beta testing at the moment.  I have been lucky enough to test it, and this is what I have found.

Importing contacts is relatively straightforward, 9 different commen formats. If you want to add contacts one by one, then the Add Contact screen is nice and simple to use.

The contact directory allows you to browse by company or by individual, and the tags - the image shows the presets of Client, Supplier, and Prospect - allow you to filter contacts according to their tags.

The neat feature of ContactZilla is that users can request updates from the contacts in their database; this means you can ensure that the data you hold is correct.  To prevent people from receiving excessive numbers of emails from the system, there are controls on the number and frequency of emails that anyone can receive.

I called this a social CRM system; so how is it social? In this early release, you can look at twitter feeds for any contact for whom you have a twitter username. If you have twitter names for more than one person in a company, the twitterfeed for the company will include all the individual twitter feeds, as shown in the image below.

The assign button next to each tweet allows you to pu that tweet into the tasks for the appropriate members of your team; the image below whows a couple of tweets assigned to myself:

There are more functions available in the current version of ContactZilla, and, as I mentioned above, it is free. SimpleWeb released a number of social media monitoring applications last year, all within the framework of the Simple Web Management tool.  Some of these, such as the Listenable social media monitoring application, will be released for inclusion in ContactZilla. This will allow you to monitor activity across the web and feed it in to your workflow. SimpleWeb also intend to open up the internal API of ContactZilla, to allow developers to produce additional apps.

So these apps or plugins will be charged, and will produce the revenue stream on which the ContactZilla is based; this, along with the simple export fnction, gives me confidence that SimpleWeb have no interest in using your data for their own purposes. The fact that a large UK Government department is already a client and using a custom version of this system gives me confidence in the security of the hosting behind it, and management of backups etc.

While still at an early stage, the ContactZilla app represents a very useful tool which will grow with organisations and provide a no-cost entry to contact management, leading to CRM, for many.  To request an invite, go to http://www.contactzilla.com.