The evolution of CRM technologies

1. How has the CRM technology today evolved compared to previous years?

Before the advent of computers and the internet, businesses relied extensively on paper to keep track of client interactions and transactions. Customer relationship management changed from paper-based to digital as computers became more accessible to businesses and consumers.

Over the past 20 years, CRM methods and technologies have undergone numerous evolutions, becoming increasingly vital for businesses to strengthen their customer database. The advent of cloud technology helped open the doors for modern CRM systems. In addition to boasting advanced analytics and comprehensive client information, CRM is now available to all types of businesses. Today, these systems aren’t solely for sales teams; they hold a vital position in imposing strong emphasis on bringing together the divisions of sales, marketing, and customer service departments to enhance customer experience and boost sales.

2. Why is CRM the need of the hour for small to mid-scale businesses? What are its benefits for organizations?

No company can survive without customers. Therefore, it’s critical for all businesses, including small and mid-scale, to maintain stellar relationships with their clients. For this, they need to prioritize their customer relationship management.

CRM software plays a crucial role in maintaining this. The system could help small to mid-scale organizations go above and beyond at every touchpoint to understand customer needs and delight them to forge lasting relationships. It also allows businesses to handle issues such as customer attrition, declining sales, and misalignment between corporate revenue targets and their salespeople’s compensation schedules, among others.

Some benefits of CRM are:

1. Improve Workflow: CRM for small businesses significantly helps in order management. It streamlines workflows, decreases potential errors, and eliminates bottlenecks. With an advanced CRM solution, employees can customize task orders, add checklist items to the workflow, receive automatic alerts and notifications, and more that help them become more productive.
2. Promote Sales: A CRM system helps you to track trends, adjust your sales strategy when needed, and keep an eye on the market. The system supports targeted marketing initiatives to raise product interest among potential customers. This generates more leads while helping you nurture them for better conversion.
3. Improve Customer Management:  CRM software keeps track of your customer’s past purchases, email correspondences, and other personal details. These specifics help you tailor your approach according to your customer’s unique needs and create an enhanced experience.
4. Helps Track Profitability: Data visibility is the best part of customer tracking software. It has an in-built analytics module that allows you to look at the data in a graph or a chart format. The clarity of information often saves a lot of time and money while equipping you with tools to keep track of profitability.
5. Ensures Regulatory Compliance: A CRM system with robust settings and easy reporting tools can perform regular checks on your business and maintain reports to ensure it is compliant with federal and state laws and industry standards.
6. Helps Increase Productivity: CRM software improves data visibility to remove ambiguity and assist you in channelizing time and effort in the right direction. It lets you prioritize tasks, nurture valuable leads, remove time-consuming manual processes, and narrow down the margin for mistakes, thereby increasing productivity by leaps and bounds.

3. How can SMEs successfully implement CRM?

Here are six key steps that clarify the required strategy businesses need to follow for a successful CRM implementation with ease:

1. Set realistic, actionable goals: You need to have a clear and simple vision for your CRM directly related to your most essential business functions.
2. Do your research to find the right CRM solution: CRM software offers immense fields of options; ensure that you choose the ones that are apt for your business.
3. Select an internal CRM team: Once you have selected the CRM platform that most closely aligns with your company’s goals, start mobilizing the creation unit. You would require a specialized internal team to complete daily tasks and steer progress. Depending on the scale of your business and the CRM implementation process, you need a team of qualified personnel, each with a defined role.
4. Forecast the costs and benefits: Work with various teams to analyze the cost involved in the CRM implementation and forecast its effects on your business during the initial six months post-launch as your team acclimates and the following 12 months once the system becomes a part of your day-to-day use.
5. Migrate and integrate data: Cleaning your data and migrating it into the new CRM platform would be the longest and one of the essential elements of the implementation. Missing or incorrect data could become a burden on users as well as reduce the effectiveness of the system. So, you need to decide what necessary data you need to migrate. This minimizes the costs and time involved while ensuring that your team is working with relevant information.
6. Train the team and test the system: Once the CRM system is successfully deployed and becomes operational, initiate training programs for your staff. They need to be knowledgeable about the system, its advantages, and how to use it to empower your business to get the most out of the platform.

4. What kind of technologies are used to implement CRM systems in organizations?

We use Java script for developing our CRM software. As a middleware, we use Apache Tomcat to run the Java code. The front end of our software is developed in Core Java, and the back end runs on SQL Server, which we would upgrade to PostgreSQL in the future.

5. Which are some of the top players in the CRM industry in India? What sets your company apart from your competitors?

Some of the top players in the CRM industry in India apart from us are ZohoCorp, Salesforce, and FreshSales.

We offer purpose-built, adaptive, and user-friendly software solutions. These are easily customizable and rapidly deployable industry-specific systems. They have the best practices rolled into software that you can configure according to your liking.

Besides being enterprise-ready CRM and HCM systems, these also have out-of-the-box integration capabilities for better, faster, and simpler business process management. When you deploy our software, you also get the flexibility of choosing from SaaS on cloud and SaaS on-premise business models.

6. Could you give us an example of a company that was able to achieve complete automation using CentraHub CRM solutions?

TATSUNO India Pvt Ltd has deployed our CRM software. The company provides fuel dispensing equipment and systems for the petroleum retail industry. Their processes and customer interactions are all designed to ensure that the customers entrust their products and services.

To sell faster and deliver smoother customer experiences, they needed to automate the workflows and enhance team productivity. With CentraHub CRM, they could do that and more. The system provides them with intelligent features to emulate complex business processes and gain a complete 360-degree view of them. Using its advanced trackers, their sales and service teams could log into the system from anywhere to monitor sales pipelines and service progress. Managers could know the whereabouts of their field service reps to process and close service requests on time.

BBG Group (Building Blocks Group) is one of the fastest-growing real estate companies. They realized that they needed more intuitive centralized HR processes and decided to deploy CentraHub HCM because of its ease of use, scalability, and security. The software gave the HR team access to the digital employee data from anywhere at any time, including on mobile devices, letting them more easily accomplish their tasks.

By adapting our cloud-based HR software, BBG Group could standardize the HR processes, pay employees on time, and use the insights to react swiftly to changing circumstances and deliver value to the business.

7. Please tell us about your revenue split and sector expertise?

We take an innovative approach to building software to help businesses improve Sales, Marketing, and Service processes. Our major clients are from real estate, automotive, education, retail, delivery and courier management industries.

8. What are the future plans on the anvil?

We intend to continue our focus on product development by entering the wider AI space and aiming toward providing users with AI-powered features – creating advanced chatbots and more insightful reporting tools. We want to enable clients with Machine Learning and RPA (Robotic Process Automation) driven applications, simplify the UI/UX to empower users with more agile and straightforward solutions, make data easily accessible and more secure through enhanced configurations, and improve our software’s existing integration capabilities to provide users with more innovative product features.