CRM On the Move

Spurred on by growth in mobility and social media, enterprises are mobile-enabling their customer relationship efforts

With consumer satisfaction becoming one of the top priorities for organisations, customer relationship management (CRM) is gradually becoming central to their digital initiatives.

According to the research firm Gartner, globally, CRM software will be the top priority for additional spending on enterprise applications, as organisations are most focused on customer retention/satisfaction and attracting new customers. Gartner observes that mobile and social technology requirements are also driving CRM spending, with mobile devices forcing the change even faster than social networks.

Enterprise mobility impact has trickled down to the CRM level. Ease of use and access to information on the fly, have made mobile devices the undisputed winner as far as access media is concerned. Mobility is here to stay and penetrate deeper into the enterprises’ IT skin. Going by the IDC report, the mobile work force will surpass 1.3 billion people by 2015, representing 37.2% of the world’s overall work force, and a similar trend is likely to reflect in Indian market as well.

Even though uptake of enterprise mobility and related applications is still at a nascent stage in India, some of the developments in the market promise exciting times ahead. Industry veterans believe, with nearly 80 million smart devices against about 100 million desktops in the country, the industry is nearing a tipping point. Currently, India has more than 160 million Internet users, of which 86 million access Internet using their mobile devices. Also, LinkedIn ranks India among its top four growth markets for the mobile usage.

As per Springboard Research, India’s mobile workforce is expected to grow 53% over a period of four years— to reach 205 million by 2015, out of which as many as 65% will be equipped with smart mobile devices. This is an obvious push for vendors to think mobile is every aspect of their offering.
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Benoy CS, Director – ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan, says that CRM is an old practice that hardly saw any major development for several years, till the mobile dimension came into the picture. In practice, broadly there are two approaches to take CRM to mobile. One way is to web enable and access the traditional CRM software on mobile, and the other one is to develop CRM applications for mobile.

“These are two different concepts that need to have specific strategies,” says Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist, Zoho. Most of the large enterprises that already had CRM systems in place, in a bid to quickly jump on to the mobile bandwagon, simply web-enabled the solution, to be able to access those on mobile.

Mobile invasion
For any technology to take off, there are certain barriers of adoption it must cross, says Benoy of Frost & Sullivan.

“One of the biggest challenges that enterprises initially faced while migrating their existing CRM solution to mobile, was that since these CRM solutions (SAP and Oracle in most cases) were very data heavy and large systems that could not run properly on basic mobile devices. The CRM vendors thus started pushing the case for smart devices to propel adoption of mobile CRM solutions,” he says.

“However, it did not help the vendors much, as the smartphones at that point of time were expensive and also issues of device management were still unresolved. In the mean time, several other players with cloud-based thin applications like Salesforce.com that could run smoothly even on basic feature phones, took the market by storm, prompting the market leaders to rethink their mobility strategies and make technology acquisitions to make their offerings more agile,” says Binoy.

In fact, many cellular service providers have taken a plunge in the mobile CRM business. There are several small developers in the India market, developing specialised applications. In most cases, it is unsustainable for them to reach out to enterprise customers directly. The cellular service providers white label these solutions and sell to the enterprises with value adds like SIMs and other applications.

“It is a win-win case for all, as the enterprises can de-risk by not depending on a small player, which may or may not exist in the future and instead have long term SLAs with the telco. For the service provider, it is and additional revenue stream,” Benoy reasons.

Gartner expects CRM apps to grow 500% by 2014 and reports that there will be 1,200 CRM apps of various flavours in app stores. The research agency citing a CIO survey of more than 2,000 people, says that vendors will need to build mobile apps around their specific strengths.

Value in apps
Agrees Vegesna of Zoho, cautioning that enterprises should not expect a single CRM application to do everything.

He feels mobile offers vendors, a rich ground to develop use cases for greater adoption of the mobile CRM.

“Basically, there are certain native CRM apps and then there are a set of CRM-supporting apps. For example, there could be an instance of an auto exhibition, where a company wants to convert all the visitors into its leads and send them emails. In that case, it might be using an app to scan visitors’ batches, another app to convert the scanned information to text, and yet another application to send out emails. In such cases, the enterprises might end up using several CRM supporting applications. “We in fact, even have a tool called ‘mail magnate’ that helps enterprises track and connect with their key accounts,” he says, adding that Zoho has been working with customers like Cleartrip Pvt Versito, People Strong and FS-Curtis India.

Manoj Khilnani, Country Marketing Head – Enterprise, BlackBerry India cites a similar case of Bangalore Traffic Police using BlackBerry devices and application to issue challans. “The application, though may not be a pure CRM application, but it does something that typically a CRM app is expected to do — trigger action on leads,” he says, adding that insurance is yet another sector, besides telecom and retail that has shown good traction in adoption of mobile CRM.

“Success of mobile CRM will largely depend on the industry’s ability to identify and develop use cases around the technology”, says Atul Tuli, Senior Sales Director – Oracle CX (Customer Experience) Solutions, Oracle APAC.

He gives an example a Bangalore-based manufacturing company uses Oracle CRM on Demand Disconnected Mobile Sales, a native Mobile Sales Application which send/receives data to and from a server, that in turn connects to CRM On Demand. The company uses the solution for their service desk. The filed staff punches information on their mobile devices and the update happens once they are in the network area. “It is not possible for the field staff to be ‘always on’ as there could be remote locations with network issues. Such an app, thus comes handy,” Tuli says, adding that Siemens, Kotak Bank, Reliance Finance are some of Orcale’s customers using mobile CRM in different forms.

“Another customer that uses Oracle’s mobile CRM solution, is a white goods manufacturing company, which is hardly using any desktop CRM. It does all their CRM activities on mobile,” says Tuli. Non-government organisation HelpAge India has also deployed Oracle CRM on demand to provide fund-raisers with real-time access to donor information and establish better relationships with donors.

Lenskart.com, an online retailer of eyewear, has mobile-enabled most of its CRM channels. Lenskart CEO Peyush Bansal says, “We use best in industry solutions for each channel (voice/social media/email/chat) and integrate them with our homegrown system. Currently we are using this for experimentation; going forward, we plan to leverage it for more handy analytics and prompt response.”

However, mobile has its own limitations of screen size, data processing speed and security. Thank God, there is cloud at the backend!

Cloud and social integration
Industry experts say even though a large number of Indian enterprises are still using legacy CRM solutions, they do not see them building those applications from the scratch. Companies realise that to stay ahead of the competition, they must replace traditional excel sheet-based systems with solutions that enable access to key information directly from the field. They have tried to do this by embracing cloud-based CRM applications.

According to Gartner’s estimates, in 2012, almost 39% of the CRM software market revenue was delivered by SaaS (software as a service). During 2016, more than 50% of the CRM software revenue is expected to be delivered by SaaS.

A challenge that most enterprises face is that they are working with old technology, observes Tuli of Oracle. “They don’t know how to move those systems to mobile. Our strategy is to offer hybrid solutions that support our old solutions as well as new mobile-enabled applications so that the customers’ investments do not go waste.”

Khilnani of BlackBerry points out that though traditionally, CRM implementations in India were mainly focused on sales, marketing & campaign management, now CRM has become an enterprise-wide initiative. “All three key areas of operations— service, marketing and analytics are important components of CRM pack,” he says.

Over the last three to four years, CRM has evolved from being just service centric. In fact, chief marketing officers are today investing more in CRM than the CIOs, says Tuli. “We offer a best of breed offering after taking into account the need of all the LoBs (line of businesses) within an enterprise. We don’t just recommend Oracle CX (cloud-enabled customer experience solution), but we offer them solutions depending on the pain points of the users,” he adds.

With a shift in the way, a CRM solution is now being perceived. Social media platforms have become a critical part of the overall CRM strategy of organisations, as communication through these has the potential to impact the organisations’ business and brand. Thus, enterprises are increasingly interested in technologies that encourage development of customer communities and social networks. Gartner predicts social CRM to grow by 28.4% annually until 2015.

While enhancements in integration have allowed social networks to become accessible to businesses, the marketing teams still find it tough to sift out new customers or upsell opportunities. Post, tweet and status planner tools, allow marketing staff to plan their social communications ahead of time and many of the social platforms now support customer list import, so enterprises can match customers to social media profiles.

Social media offers several opportunities, at the same time, it has its own challenges as well, points out, Nibha Aggarwal, Director-Product Marketing, Amdocs. She says, “With proper social CRM tools, traditional customer relationship management practices can be extended to social media. It is important to develop collaborative experiences on social media and the solution must enhance experience.”

The mobile shift
Another big change that the shift in CRM usage has led to, is in the form of the look and feel of the mobile CRM solutions.

Tuli of Oracle stresses that a solution is successful only if it is accepted by the users, a software might be great, but if it does not compel users to adopt, it serves no purpose. Not all tools and features might be required on a mobile offering, so it is no use cluttering the mobile space. “Most CRM solutions have tools that are available in any other accounting or financial application, I believe it must also have some good to have features to push the usage,” he adds.

“A major chunk of CRM applications available in the market today are designed to provide management data, rather than improve workflow for people in the field. These applications are typically laden with many features and functions that mobile workers don’t need or can’t use. Navigating the menus and options is often slow for remote wireless users, which ultimately causes confusion, frustration and abandonment of the application,” says Kumar Siddhartha, Managing Director of Sage Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

“Therefore it is extremely important to provide the right set of data to the right user and make navigation fast and easy for the end user. Data management and delivering the right data to the right user, is actually not a very complicated process. Though, there is a complete science behind ensuring that data is managed and delivered intelligently. It is here that a mobile CRM’s capability to define smart workflows, rules and alerts comes into play.

There are a few other challenges to mobile CRM in India—the most crucial ones being security and connectivity. A mobile theft will also mean theft of crucial information of the company. There are other critical security concerns like handset security, transmission security, backend security, etc.

Mobile CRM is typically based on internet and that can be a big challenge when it comes to India. India is still picking up with its mobile internet penetration, with 3G services being mostly available in key cities and a major chunk of internet user still using the GPRS and Edge technology. Moreover, the industry will face the real test in developing use cases that will help mobile CRM to drive revenues.

Vegesna sums up, saying that whatever might be the permutation and combination of tools that an organisation uses, key factors are that how much can each piece be customisable and how well it is integrated—all goes well if the integration is done effectively.