BANGALORE, INDIA: Raj Mruthyunjayappa, VP and MD, Talisma, Asia-Pacific and Europe talks to Atreyee Dutta about their focus in the SMB segment and CRM market in India. 

What is your take on the CRM market in India?

Indian CRM is evolving with a more structured approach. Now, organizations are looking at a scalable setup. We had a 110 per cent growth in the CRM market in India and this speaks volumes about the Indian market. In India, we have launched two distinct things. One is the business intelligence tool that is more of an analyzing and reporting system. The second is a next generation portal which is more of a platform for social CRM. This portal is a scalable, configurable, and secure customer self service web portal designed to enable organizations to enhance their customers experience by extending Talisma functionality to the web. The company is currently focusing on expanding the sales and marketing for the Indian SMB sector. In 2009, Talisma had launched the CRMAtom for the SMB market in India.

What are the key trends and challenges in the Indian market?

I believe that the acceptance of 3G technology would change the face of CRM in India. With the growing importance of social networking in all spheres, CRM too needs to adopt the social platform for creating a collaborative environment. Particularly in the case of India, a very limited section of people have access to email owing to the requirement of a desktop or a laptop. But, with the advent and subsequent adoption of 3G, the mobile phones will make email accessible to all, considering the fact that sms is still the most popular mode of communication. Henceforth, companies will also look out for sophisticated softwares to reach out to the customers or the business partners in tier-2 cities, thus, making the service more customer centric rather than urban centric.

What are Talismas market strategies for India?

The requirement for a lower cost marketing automation is driving up the demand for CRM applications; and Talismas platform capabilities across sales, marketing and service have created the need for more sophisticated CRM softwares. We are looking forward to hire more people in India. Earlier, there was no partner strategy in India. We had our own sales team. But, now we are looking forward to collaborate with organizations that provide services similar to that of Talisma to give the customers a holistic CRM experience. We have recently partnered with HCL Technologies to combine the CRM and BPO expertise to offer the clients a CRM enabled business process outsourcing. This will augment Talismas service portfolio by helping us migrate from the transaction management model to the more comprehensive transaction implementation, design and execute model.