“Clear evidence of shift in power from vendors to customers”

Vinay Iyer, Vice President Global Marketing, SAP CRM, SAP Global Marketing Inc discussed two important trends in the CRM market with Akhtar Pasha—one, where large corporations are leveraging the power of social CRM, and the second, with regard to mobile CRM which is ready for deployment

Vinay Iyer

We have noticed some innovative ad campaigns by technology companies on social networking sites. What’s driving corporations to link their CRM system to social media?

There is a noticeable shift in power from vendors to customers as a result of social CRM. Traditionally CRM systems assisted organizations by bringing together data from all areas of an organization, giving a 360 degree view of their customers for marketing and sales to make informed decisions on cross-selling/up-selling opportunities as well as use the same data to analyze and form marketing strategies and corporate communications.

Social CRM, on the other hand, is an extension of your existing CRM with additionally functionality to leverage social Web and automate the conversations process. It allowed marketers and merchandize to listen to customer conversations [offline/online], draft appropriate messages and join them customer interactions happening on social media and offer them value in terms of information and solution. It is also helping in generating marketing intelligence.

There are plenty of examples to quote of how corporations are leveraging the social media. For example, Dell has made $3 million on Twitter since 2007 when it started posting coupons there. In the last six months, Dell Outlet earned $1 million in sales from customers who came to the site from Twitter, after taking 18 months to earn its first $1 million. Dell has also earned another $1 million from people who click from Twitter to Dell Outlet to Dell.com and make a purchase there. Similarly, for Comcast (the cable giant), Twitter has changed their culture. Comcast has been using Twitter to scan for complaints and engage with customers for a while now. The idea rose organically when someone in the company realized that a lot of public complaints were being sent over Twitter. So you see a lot of large corporations are using social media monitoring platform to listen to those ongoing conversations and take the right steps to engage folks in ways that help them connect with the community.

The fallout of this new trend has put the CRM vendors [SAP, Siebel/Oracle, Sage] in overdrive to offer enterprise mobility—mobile CRM. Additionally, the market is also seeing burgeoning new mobile devices and mobile OS every three months. This has opened up new marketing opportunity for FMCG/Retail customers as well vendors to offer mobile CRM solution.

We are also using Twitter and other social sites to listen to our customers. We have a dedicated team that tracks top social networking sites wherever SAP is discussed on a 24x7 basis. Some of the improvements that you have seen in SAP Business Suite 7.0 were result of discussions customers had on social sites.

What’s the rationale behind SAP’s partnership with RIM and Sybase?

Our long-term strategy is to offer business applications on mobile devices, including the iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Symbian and Palm devices. Our partnership would leverage Sybase's Unwired Platform to make business processes from SAP Business Suite 7's available on every mobile device in the world.

Additionally by definition, salespeople are mobile and it made sense to partner with RIM to produce a mobile Sales Force Automation application, enabling salespeople to be productive on the move.

We have also formed partnership with Syclo (to co-innovate to deliver mobile asset and service management solution to customers also called field CRM) so that we can extend our CRM solution to mobile platforms. In this direction we would be launching a new mobile CRM application called ‘Mobile inbox’ for mobile phones such as iPhone, Microsoft Windows Mobile in H1 2010. The mobile inbox would be an actionable CRM where users can do service management, sales, do travel and expense management as well as SCM.

Mobile CRM is no longer a fancy technology. We have 12 customers who are doing pilots with SAP-RIM and SAP-Sybase platform.

The market has not been kind to SAP Business ByDesign offering for the mid-market segment, which is yet to see big traction here in India. Why is that?

I would not say that the market has not been kind to SAP Business ByDesign. We are currently working with more than 100 so called charter clients and continue to receive very good feedback. But we always said we wanted to introduce the solution in a step by step approach to ensure that we get the entire business model right before entering volume business. And where we are today proves that this was the right approach. With SAP Business ByDesign FP 20 launched in July 2009 we now offer 30 integrated, end-to-end business processes. And in 2010 we will take the final steps towards volume business by fully enabling it for multi-tenancy which means we can now host a high number of concurrent users on one blade. Before we had one blade per customer – this change allows much greater scalability. In addition, we will provide in-memory technology with the next version which allows queries to be performed in a sub-second sector. The new Microsoft Silverlight interface in addition will again considerably improve usability. And towards the end of 2010 we will provide software development kits for partners to develop their own industry-specific add-ons on ByDesign which will again extend the reach of the solution.