The drive to adopt CRM is driven by the eagerness of companies to keep their customers satisfied and it has outgrown its SFA roots in India. By Jasmine Desai
In the era of the connected consumer, CRM is starting to come into its own in the Indian market. The essential factors that bring it into focus are existing market dynamics and the fact that customer engagement is the topmost priority for organizations today.
Raj Mruthyunjayappa, Managing Director, APAC & Europe Talisma Corporation Pvt. Ltd, commented, “In times of low customer spending, the focus often shifts towards strengthening existing customer relationships and boosting a company’s share of the customer’s wallet. CRM is no longer seen as a tool. Rather, it is being viewed as an enabler.”
More and more, businesses are analyzing the data generated by CRM applications in order to predict customer behavior and buying patterns.
Sanchit Vir Gogia, Senior Analyst, Forrester Inc, said, “Customers are demanding personalized attention, whether it is interaction through a Web site or through the mobile Web or an app. This is pushing CIOs to think of CRM in a different way.” Customer retention, social media collaboration, enhancing global customer base, surge in mobility along with time and cost can all be attributed as major elements that are creating a shift in the CRM market.
Steve Kraus, Senior Director of Product Marketing, CRM Solutions, Pegasystems Worldwide, commented, “Companies have come to the realization that they need to take a new approach and that they can no longer rely on traditional rigid applications, outdated waterfall deployment methodologies and the replication of content across channel silos.” Today’s customer service, sales and marketing organizations are actively looking to break these silos in order to provide a multichannel customer experience.
Manish Panjwani, Managing Director, Technology Growth Platform, Accenture, India, said, “With customers gaining a voice by means of social media, enterprises are increasingly taking advantage of crowd sourcing for improving the business. Tapping current customers for fresh ideas helps an organization provide the innovation and interactive relationship that customers expect nowadays.”
The availability of analytics in CRM software is another factor that has been changing the decision-making pattern. According to Sumeet Jain, Head of New Service Lines, CSC India, “With the help of analytics, key stakeholders can see their product penetration, customer segmentation, while also studying historical and upcoming trends in terms of demand and supply. It helps in adopting the right marketing campaigns for specific areas and also in inventory management as well as valuation based on trends.”
The ability to utilize analytics in real-time puts tremendous power in the hands of a customer service representative who can now provide better service since the software enables them to predict the likelihood of an action resolving any situation that might arise during an interaction. While analytics is a powerful capability it is important to understand that unless it can be applied directly within customer processes, its promise will remain largely unfulfilled.
Ravi Teja, Vice President, Global Consulting Businesses, Nihilent Technologies, said, “CRM analytics can be considered as a form of OnLine Analytical Processing (OLAP) and may employ data mining. As Web sites have added a new and often faster way to interact with customers, the need to turn the data that’s been collected about customers into useful information has become apparent.”
Inherent challenges
It’s not all smooth sailing in CRMville. There remain inherent challenges that are part and parcel of any evolving technology. The basic challenge lies in implementation. Panjwani of Accenture, India said, “CRM programs are typically developed and implemented by cross-organizational teams with representation from each functional department. This stimulates cooperation and communication, but putting this into practice is difficult.”
According to industry estimates, only one in six companies has managed to deploy CRM successfully. The principal reason for this lack of success is confusion within a company. Getting all of the departments and employees on board with CRM, which is necessary for long-term success, is a challenge that most companies face.
CRM is a major investment and, time and again, it has been seen that a major part of the success of any CRM system is the way that it is bought and implemented. When buying a CRM solution, companies must ensure that the new system integrates with existing applications. The CRM system has to have a robust API for integration so that it can be integrated with other technologies such as the company’s phone system and Web site.
According to Gogia of Forrester, “Manipulating CRM data to optimize customer data is not a new experience. However, the data sources have increased and changed. The model for analyzing data has also changed. The challenge now is to integrate customers’ social profiles with their CRM profiles.”
This is happening to a certain extent. Earlier, customer information used to lie in separate data warehouses as organizations would have different data stores for CRM, ERP and dealer management. An integrated picture of customer information is essential for which you need to integrate data warehouses.
Vilakshan Jhaku, Senior VP & CIO, BPTP Ltd, said, “CRM implementations are never popular in any organization. They need to be designed keeping the end-user in mind and not the management.”
A misconception enveloping CRM is that it is technology-driven or that it is simply a technology. CRM is supported by a technological infrastructure, including software solutions that are used to gather, analyze and interpret customer data. However, these technological capabilities alone do nothing to make companies successful. 
According to Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist, Zoho, “The biggest challenge with CRM adoption or implementation is data entry. Unless a CRM system makes it easy for users to enter data, it will not garner sufficient adoption within a business. For a system like CRM, it is important to keep it simple and not spend too much time on over-engineering the system.”
CRM requires a clear and thoughtful strategy with cross-organizational integration. It is grounded in goals, metrics and measurement of performance with customers. Gogia of Forrester Inc said, “All the tools and models are no good if an organization does not understand what business outcomes it wants to reach. A product customer engagement strategy is essential and, accordingly, tools should be purchased to serve these business pointers.”
Organizations are at struggling to change their approach when it comes to CRM implementations. ROI pressures are driving companies to adopt an agile approach to implementations. Rather than it being a one-sided affair with the company drawing up a laundry list of specs and handing it over to the partner, nowadays, a more collaborative approach is being taken. Kraus of Pegasystems commented, “Business and IT organizations are finding ways to collaborate with each other and new technology is enabling companies to capture their objectives directly in the software itself, without the need for code. Companies are working to deploy functionality faster, get the RoI and then continue to expand functionality to cover additional areas.”
Thanks to social media and increasing interaction between people and the companies behind the products that they consume, customers’ opinions about the products or services that they use have become a business driver. As a result, companies must listen and respond to what people are saying and harness the power of current technology to continue to anticipate and deliver what their customers want.
Trends in CRMville
According to Gartner, the CRM space is a $8 billion industry. CRM as a customer strategy has gained ground in a wide range of industries with the result that there has been a sharp increase in the number of CRM suppliers. Organizations are looking to extend CRM beyond the front office in order to ensure that the entire organization (including the backoffice teams) is engaged in improving the customer relationship. According to Kraus at Pegasystems, “We are seeing companies adopting a customer-centric approach by designing the experience around the customer and controlling it through channel, device, lifecycle phase, product and geography.”
The marketing and technology aspects of CRM will potentially grow in coming years. Companies looking to harness the power of customer relationships should pursue strategies that are in line with the type of customers that they have and the type that they want to acquire. An apt example would that be of BPTP that deals in real estate. The company recently implemented Oracle’s Siebel CRM. It has something known as “Customer Delights” for customers who always make payments on time. Jhaku of BPTP Ltd elaborated, “The Avaya telephony system that has been installed has a feature of voice recognition that detects if the customer is irritated or angry and, accordingly, the executive deals with the customer in a particular way. Social media is not very relevant for us, however.”
If BPTP receives an email from a customer, the CRM system searches for the customer’s the name on LinkedIn and gives the closest possible option after categorizing the results. If the system find a lot of people from a certain organization who have dealing with BPTP, it might tie-up with the organization for a project.
Mobile CRM is on the radar. According to Vegesna of Zoho, “We will see the power of backend CRM systems taken to a new level with mobility. For instance, you could take a photo of a business card and the content of the card would be OCR’d and saved to your CRM system directly from your phone.” Mobile-to-CRM integration opens up lots of interesting scenarios. The ability to provide enhanced mobile interfaces will have far-reaching effects on consumer interactions.
According to Jain of CSC India, “CRM is an evolving tool. There are lots of possibilities for enhancement. Its tight integration with ERP transforms the business process and provides a 360 degree view of the business.”
Process orientation is not particularly high in India. The growing use of mobile devices, the consumerization of IT and BYOD are all prompting Indian CIOs to adopt CRM on the mobile.
Then there are the regulatory mandates. Gogia of Forrester said, “There are regulations that pertain to this area. E.g. RBI has mandated that banks keep their data only in India. This requires CRM vendors to sign partnerships with local hosting providers in India so that the data can be hosted locally. These partnerships are vital in India. Partner-hosted CRM will be the next big thing.”
Organizations are buying solutions that enable them to better market to, sell to and service their customers. The experience that a customer has with an organization is paramount. With social media, revenue opportunities abound and a negative customer experience can be broadcast to millions of people online. Today’s solutions need to be multichannel and provide a seamless experience to customers. They want to be able to start a session via social media or chat and then be able to move to the contact center if needed without having to restart an interaction. Businesses are looking for technology that enables them to better know their customers and to better apply that customer context through more personalized interactions.
One cannot undermine the relationship aspect when it comes to CRM. As Teja from Nihilent Technologies put it, “As the number of ways in which companies interact with customers continues to grow, CRM systems will play a bigger role in building quality relationships.”
