Spotlight

CRM for small businesses

CRM 24x7’s success in the Indian market in the CRM space can be gauged from the fact that it has created a market for itself amidst the SAPs and Oracles of the world. There are plenty of opportunities for CRM 24x7 in the SMB space that wants niche solutions. By Mohd Shariff PA

“There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” are the words of Richard P. Feynman, a world renowned physicist of the 1950s and how true this phase is even in today’s business scenario. While the enterprise application software (EAS) market that includes ERP, CRM, SCM has already seen consolidation in the past two years, CRM 24x7 started its Indian operations three years back and has found solid ground in the CRM space. It has more than a dozen customers using its CRM solutions in India with a client list that includes Anna Aluminium, Bergen Systems, Chloroplast, TVS Tread Pvt Ltd, Idea Designs, Navalogam Pvt. Ltd, Nediyara Extrusions (P) Ltd and Tubes & Tubings and the like.

The company is a provider of CRM solutions for banking, manufacturing and FMCG companies across the globe. With dozens of solutions, domain and technology experts, CRM 24x7 contributes to the knowledge economy of the global market with CRM solutions having six marketing and support offices globally.

Mohammed Ali, President and CEO, CRM 24x7 says, “We started CRM 24x7 in India in January 2004 with the objective of changing the way EAS software is deployed by small, medium and enterprise customers. In those days CRM product licensing
and implementations were prohibitively expensive and many projects were failing because of cost overruns. Unable to afford such cost overruns small and mid-sized companies were left with inefficient sales and customer support applications. This was preventing them from competing in global markets.” CRM 24x7 was developed primarily to address the needs of such companies.

Simplifying the CRM deployment model

CRM 24x7 is a total business management solution designed to offer all the components of a CRM application such as sales force management, service management, inventory management, order fulfilment (sales orders and replenishment order), customer self service management, service partner portal and reseller portal. The company believes that it has a comprehensive CRM solution that can be deployed on both licensed and open source platforms.

Ali says, “We are offering the product in three different models namely Perpetual User License model, On-Demand Hosted model (SaaS) and the recently launched Software On Lease model to facilitate easy adoption by Indian customers. In the On-Demand Hosted model a customer needs to follow three simple steps to sign up for a world-class Sales Force Automation application and Customer Service solution. Fill up our application form and you are ready to go.”

Businesses can access an application with features and functionalities that are normally available to large companies helping small and mid-sized businesses compete with their larger counterparts. Ali says, “It’s simple to access the application—configure the application, create employee profiles and create access rights and your business is ready to go. If you would like to migrate data from other internal applications, our migration scripts can do it automatically for you.” A business can start using the application to create sales leads and opportunities or create trouble tickets for customer service. Customer data is safe and secure and is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and is accessible from any Web Browser, anywhere in the world.

Further more CRM24x7 is uniquely designed and engineered to cater to the needs of all types of industries. Developed using the J2EE Architecture, CRM24x7 is accessible from any Web browser to agents and customers worldwide. Ali says “These applications will help business generate additional revenue (new sales), reduce the duration of sales cycle, reduce customer support cost, ensure customer satisfaction, retention, cross and up sell products, get repeat business and generate additional maintenance revenue, ultimately increasing your business value.”

CRM24x7 helps support and sales force agents gain a 360 degree view of their customers irrespective of the touch points. “We read the draft of the customer and design the architecture according to that—that’s how we have been gaining business opportunities in the market,” says Ali. Idea Design Solutions that specialises in providing CAD/CAM/CAE products and services had approached his company with some business challenges such as the sales personnel were not able to generate revenues. For example salespeople generate several demo requests each month that took significant time but were not effective as the demos were pitched to an audience that didn’t include the decision makers and sales cycle was getting longer. Idea Design Solutions wanted a mechanism to reduce the cost of sale. They also wanted to up cross sell to the existing customer base. “We looked into the problem area and we developed a demo request and approval process within the sales module. With the demo request process, the sales executive has to fill the demo request page within the sales module with all relevant information about the prospect. Once this page is saved, it automatically gets dispatched to the sales manager who can approve or deny the request. If the sales manager approves, the demo, it automatically gets dispatched once again to the sales executive. This completely eliminated the waste of time and money in arranging and giving demos and has made their sales cycle a lot more effective,” says Ali.

New growth areas

CRM 24x7 has operations in six centres and has experience in different vertical areas. Ali believes that as the market is booming for CRM and small and mid-sized business are also looking at technology adoption; there will definitely be growth in the coming quarters. Ali says, “We have a well structured plan designed for India where the market is taking a radical shift in its approach. We have identified more than 1,400 customers who wish to go for CRM using a different model; we will focus on 1,200 of these in the next two months and we expect to get sound business out of it. We believe that there is a huge customer base for us. We are focusing on manufacturing, logistics, FMCG, textiles, pharmaceuticals, automobile, chemical, insurance and financial services such as mutual fund houses.

Like many other fast growing companies, CRM 24x7 has a clear focus on the market. The solution is comprehensive and highly configurable. The company has successfully deployed CRM24x7 at manufacturing companies, service organisations and financial organisations. Ali claims, “Each of these vertical products will soon be packaged and marketed to those verticals as vertical solutions, which is expected in the third quarter of CY 2007.

To cater to demands of the customers, CRM 24x7 has opened three offices in India—Delhi, Chennai and Cochin. The company is seriously considering opening an office in Mumbai by JAS 2007. By the end of this year company would like to open two more offices at Bangalore and Hyderabad.