CRM: Cup Noodles, Sushi or Spaghetti

BANGALORE, INDIA: CRM watchers across the industry have been stonking the space with a lot of gap-watching lately. Some argue that CRM suites are just not doing enough to make the investment worthwhile, some magnify their lenses on how solutions thin out across the marketing cycle, some have their ears pricked up all the time on the side-effects of social CRM as well conspicuous absence of enough visualization, and some are worried on the staggering pace at which almost every next answer is hitting the commoditization wall.

Is the scenario really that hopeless? Are customers actually left with choices polarized on three pillars - go for a run-of-the-mill offering, try to bundle together product curve and customer cycles across silos internally, or manage with loosely coupled solutions?

We get a chance to ask these and few other apprehensions about CRM's relevance in this interview with Rajendra Mruthyunjayappa, Managing Director, Talisma (APAC) where he also slices some interesting angles on Indian market's evolution, specially and surprisingly, in universities and classrooms.

As some CRM experts have intriguingly pointed out - Is it right that it's about time that CRM is approached beyond the current mindset, much past a frivolous attitude, with a platform approach? Specially with so many concerns sprouting on integration issues and a fast commoditizing plank?

CRM is not a product as I think it to be. It is a strategy. Customer experience tools work as enablers and we need to understand the technology at the core. It is a tool and an important part of the strategy, and it's crucial that you know how to extend it and take it to where you want. In fact, we engage with clients early on to carve this strategy together. It should boil down to - how to give my customer a better experience, whether we are talking grocery stores or premium outlets. That also means providing internal customers the power and transformation and making the utmost possible with our tech suites when it comes to giving superior experience at high levels of engagement for the industry.

Which side of the table do you find yourself at when the talk moves to Social CRM?

I would say a lot of people are doing it and not using it. It has to evolve on product ideas as it is a trend that has to mature with the right kind of product strategy. Sales is not about creating needs, it is about fulfilling needs. What's the point in creating demand with no value behind it, and no triggers to support it? Systems are at times designed in a disjointed fashion, and not thought-through. It's up to a smart user to ask - what will this actually mean from a business point of view?

Have CRM suites been approaching the plateau of commoditization faster than expected?

Unless someone is able to sustain investments in R&D, it's easier to say the space is getting commoditised. These people look at CRM as a mere tool without value. The differentiation after all happens with one's overall approach on how to engage customers and aspire for an outcome-based solution, instead of a task-based solution. For companies chasing outcomes, the scenario is always going to be cutting-edge. We at Talisma, for example, force this on to the client and try to inject the imperative that results should be tied tightly to business. If you do that, ‘that' is very hard to commoditise.

How critical is it now to address issues like data clean-up, duplication, visualization gaps, integration costs etc?

One of the key things we have built in a SOA flavor is event-driven architecture which is work-flow-based. So when it comes to integration parts, we can work around events. Visualising the work flow is possible. For instance - from the point the product is purchased to loyalty points and other events in the life cycle. This technology is very nimble and can change as the business alters, and on-the-fly. Changes have to be agile and visible and as long as you can manage that with proper hook-up points as well as ease of configuration, it is a good solution.

What's been your sense of India as a market for CRM?

It is a skip phase, a jump as compared to western markets, where we have seen retail stores evolve to premium outlets. But in India, the scenario has immediately phased into experience-levels. There are fabulous technology solutions around with ease of working as mobile applications enabling real-time, walk-in experience. Even if this new trend of proactive customer engagement is at a nascent stage, a lot of analytics will follow to promote the right products and leverage all this explosive/invaluable information at your hands. A lot of established stores will have (have started in fact) to compete with online stores. It is still a small slice so the scope is huge. Both pure online retail shop-lets as well as in-store established supply chains can co-exist in this region. A lot of customer engagement will happen nonetheless.

You have had some academic-segment wins of late. How and why does CRM make sense in a campus?

Yes, IIM-Udaipur selected Campus Management as its Exclusive Education Solutions Provider and Raffles College of Higher Education enhanced its students' academic experience with CampusVue. I am particularly excited to see how academic institutions are waking up to looking afresh at the complete student experience. There is a big change in this industry on engaging their students better, more so as we see how content is anyways available online these days. So what a classroom can still offer make a difference. We do end-to-end IT enablement, schedule planning, admission cycle automation, curriculum management and everything across many touch-points covering all stakeholders. The segment is and has to evolve at the pace of this new iPhone generation.

Does it not bump into fears of people in academia turning redundant if so much technology runs the show?

Look at it this way. Once the content is available online, it leaves more time and energy (with reduced workloads) for a professor to give time to things that are more crucial - like research, better student interventions, making a student absorb the content with the right analysis and context and help them reflect/innovate/collaborate and so on.

As to CRM conversations, will they continue with CIOs or CMOs?

Large retail chains have CIOs but we also try to get to CEOs and second-level heads of customer service to explain them the possibilities of how to do things differently.