Indians believe contacts are must for career

According to the Eight Connection Survey, Indians agree that caring for contacts is crucial for a successful career.

Sansan Inc., the cloud-based business card management service provider, has come up with the results of its Eight Connection Survey. Targeted at 1,008 full-time working professionals across four cities in India—Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai— the survey emphasised on the importance of efficient business card management in the Indian market. It also talks about the benefits contact management brings to careers.

According to the survey, Almost 93 per cent respondents believe that the best way to manage contacts is on the cloud. 43 per cent of the respondents feel that inefficient contact management directly hurts the business. They agreed to have missed out on business opportunities because of misplacing business cards. However, 62 per cent respondents still store business cards in a card holder.

In fact, even when storing contacts online, input is mostly done manually. 57 per cent feed details into their phones manually, whereas 37 per cent do it on their computers.

Almost all the respondents believe business cards play a vital role in advancing their careers. While 73 per cent respondents exchange business cards in meetings every time or almost every time, 80 per cent have exchanged business cards outside of work. 71 per cent stated that they carry their business cards with them everywhere they go.

Edward Senju, executive producer of Eight in an official statement says, “In the Indian market, who you know can make or break your career, and business cards play a significant role in helping stay on top of things. They remain the key tool to expand one’s professional network, but are close to useless if not managed properly. Through this survey, we have gained some wonderful insights into the management of business cards in India, and we actually found a lot of similarities between the Indian and the Japanese markets. This assures us that Indians are ready to embrace our business card management software in order to boost their careers. With Eight, we want to help Indians achieve their goal of making every connection count.”

As per the survey finding, 93 per cent respondents believe that cloud-based contact management is the way forward.

The survey was conducted amongst 60 per cent men and 40 per cent women to gain a gender-neutral view of contact management. While men had more business contacts vis-à-vis personal contacts than women, the most important aspects of business cards—mobile numbers and e-mail IDs—were of equal importance to all respondents.