perhaps you never installed a contact manager when you cooked the rom. Try installing a contact manager like pocketCM or something. Because I use pocketCM and I didn't include a contact manager in the rom because the new one wasn't built into a oem yet so when I started the phone my right soft key was still mapped to the contacts which was not there. I had to map it to pocketCM to open it like contacts. However I used to put an older version in rom and I worked right off the bat with the right soft key going to pocketCM and everything. Try that hopefully that works.
This is where you can find it.
http://www.pocketcm.com/