Indian Enterprises Consume the CRM Elixir

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Rajneesh De, Consulting Editor, APAC News Network

In India’s current business landscape, CRM has become an indispensable tool for organizations aiming to thrive and grow. Effective CRM software will streamline interactions with customers and help the businesses better understand customer needs, thereby boosting sales, and building long-lasting relationships.

CRM encompasses a set of techniques, methods, and technologies used by enterprises to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the entire customer lifecycle. CRM systems gather meaningful information from different customer-company interactions, from different channels including website, phone, mobile, app, live chat, direct mail, marketing material, and social media profiles. Subsequently, these CRM systems provide customer-facing executives with relevant insights detailing information regarding purchase history, preferences, and other issues.

Dissecting the Indian CRM Market

The revenue from the Indian CRM software market is projected to reach $1.03bn by the end of 2023. Henceforth, this CRM revenue is expected to show an annual CAGR (2023-2028) of 16.81%, resulting in a market size of $2.24bn by 2028. Translate this into rupees, and the CRM software market in India is expected to reach Rs 1443.4 crore by 2027, up from Rs 532.4 crore in 2021, expanding at a CAGR of 18.14 % during the 2022 – 2027 period.

Contrast this with the global CRM market. It was valued at Rs 42,914.8 crore in 2021 and is expected to reach Rs 81,608.2 crore by 2027, expanding at a CAGR of11.52% during the 2022 – 2027 period. As per Gartner, the global CRM market in 2023 is expected to touch $860 billion making it one of the largest enterprise application markets.

While there are quite a few CRM players in the enterprise application space, the market is dominated by the top 5 led by the likes of Salesforce (38%), Oracle (12%), Adobe (4%), Microsoft (3%) and SAP (3%) among others. This still leaves quite a few smaller players contributing to the remaining 40% of the market. These include the likes of AWS, Zoho, Hubspot, Engagebay, LeadSquared, QBurst Technologies, Fresh Sales and Nextsky Technologies among others.

Salesforce is perhaps the most well-established CRM in the Indian market with the largest market share. It provides enterprises with personalized solutions that include in-depth and customized features including AI analytics, lead scoring, sales management, lead management and sales forecasting. Sales Cloud offers a high degree of customization, allowing enterprise businesses to tailor the platform to their specific needs.

Although Salesforce is now an all-in-one CRM, it was first designed as a sales CRM and this perhaps gives the Indian enterprise customers the biggest benefits of deploying Salesforce CRM. Salesforce CRM integrates with a wide variety of enterprise applications, provides robust and in-depth reporting features, tailored solutions that fit enterprise business processes perfectly and offers in-depth and extensive training resources. The forecasting and AI features are very modern abd can be used for account management or lead management or the dashboards for better user experience.

The plethora of features or the customization available can often turn into a bane for enterprise Salesforce users. Going to list views looks different than building out filters in report views which can often confuse or slow down novel users when they are learning how to leverage the platform to look into their territory and edit account information. Sometimes, the level of customization possible can be the hardest thing about the platform as well. It takes practice to know where to look and how to configure the features the enterprise users can get the most use out of. Often Salesforce takes a long time to set up and at $150 per user/month for enterprise users and $300 per user/month for unlimited usafw, it can be a costly proposition too.

Oracle Siebel CRM is capable of extreme scale and performance for even the most complex enterprises. Oracle Siebel CRM offers myriad customization and integration capabilities, an open architecture for a personalized user experience, and can be deployed either on-premises or in the cloud. Oracle Sales guides sellers with intelligent recommendations to help them focus on the most valuable prospects at the right time. These machine learning-based CRM selling tools center around clean, complete customer data from internal and external sources that sellers can trust.
Indus Towers, Aurobindo Pharma, Rallis India, Om Logistics, CRI pumps, SBI Cards, Spectra, Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance are some Oracle’s major CRM customers in India. Starting from $65/per user per month for Professional Edition to $300/user per month, Oracle offers a less expensive proposition. Add to it the longevity in India—Oracle’s CRM business primarily grew inorganically, thanks to its Siebel acquisition.

Adobe Experience Cloud enables enterprise users to manage the sales, marketing and support facets of their customer engagement strategies. Experience Cloud includes features like targeted list generators, enhanced email campaign functions, operational reporting tools, unique profiles and more that can be a boon for sales professionals. The CRM platform’s integrated functions, in addition, offer real-time updates and data to users to help them centralize, organize and manage key customer, sales and lead data.

Experience Cloud has more than 165 app partners, including Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce and SAP. Through Adobe and Microsoft’s partnership, enterprise users of Experience Cloud and Dynamics 365 can use the platforms together to align sales and marketing information and identify high-value audience segments. These users can also combine behavior data with order history and other customer details to identify their sales lifecycle stage and deliver content at the right time through a landing page, follow-up email or mobile app alert.

Adobe’s CRM platform also integrates with social media platforms, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. As a result, features like social measurement, publishing and listening functions, including text, mobile app and social media analytics are easily available. In addition, predictive publishing that lets users engage with customers and analyze interactions. The platform can document this data in Audience Manager to create unique audience profiles. This often helps enterprise users stay on top of and track customer interactions.

Drivers for CRM Adoption

The pandemic forced most enterprise businesses to shift to online methods of operations. This needed enterprises to adopt collaboration tools and practices to support the concept of a virtual workplace. Digitization and automation have also become imperative at the same time for these businesses due to sporadic lockdowns and regulations pertaining to COVID-19.

Businesses are always on the lookout today for CRM systems that can extract, analyze, and interpret data in real time so they can make quick, fact-based decisions. CRM can help businesses understand their customers’ needs and concerns, allowing them to be precise and considerate when making decisions to nurture those relationships. Meaningful insights are so critical to nurture customer growth. CRM enables these enterprises to gather insights into their customers’ behavior and modify business operations to ensure they are served effectively.

On the contrary, there are a few bottlenecks in CRM adoption too. Adoption of these complex technologies often results in the creation of complex data, which raises security issues. Concerns about security breaches, in any case, increase when the number of connected devices goes up. Customers can also face unpleasant experience because of long response times during phone calls, improper handling of technical support cases, and other problems,

Devising CRM Adoption Plan

Define a CRM strategy

The first step is to understand and define what the enterprise wants to achieve with the CRM. Plan out the goals, targets, what the organization needs, where you need the CRM the most, and what changes you need to make in your organization in order to accommodate the CRM smoothly.

Defining a CRM strategy can save a CIO a lot of time when the actual implementation takes because he is sure of what he needs from the deplyment. A CRM strategy can also ensure you have backup plans in case things don ot work out the way you want them to.

Build a deployment timeline

Opting for a single deadline will only complicate your ability to stay on course and determine if you are making progress toward completing the implementation within the given timeframe. Instead, divide the implementation into smaller tasks and then carefully assign deadlines to each of these tasks. This approach will facilitate more rigorous monitoring the overall progress and give the CIO a clear indication of remaining work and required effort.

Convert and store data in a portable format.

The next and perhaps the most important step is to store the data generated in a format that can be migrated. This can be information from a previous CRM or fresh inputs on excel sheets. The CIO nevertheless needs to work with the CRM provider to ensure a process to set up the CRM to be able to use right away.

Integrate CRM data with other third-party applications

The CIO needs to make sure to integrate your implementation with third-party applications to prevent any leakage of leads. He should utilize the CRM’s APIs to integrate all your applications and conduct thorough testing to ensure their reliability. Since technical challenges are frequent during this phase, it is advisable to have a dedicated test team that verifies the proper flow of leads from various platforms into the adopted CRM system.

Prepare a training and on-boarding plan

After the implementation of the CRM system, it becomes crucial for the sales representatives to acquire a comprehensive understanding of its usage. This makes creating a robust training and on-boarding procedure an absolute imperative. Although ideally CRM providers offer training and on-boarding support, there are instances where some CRM providers are not up to the mark on the training front. Consequently, it is essential to have the internal IT team prepared to educate the sales staff, enabling them to swiftly and proficiently utilize the CRM system.