Interviews

CRM Spending On Sales Force Automation To Drop By 2020

C-Zentrix
Sandeep Rattan Bhatt
National Sales Head, C-Zentrix
Evolving technology and business trends are redefining the SME ecosystem. One of the primary needs for any business today is to strengthen their CRM (customer relationship management) techniques.

C-Zentrix, the flagship product of Towards Vision Technologies Private Limited (TVT), is helpign organizations across industries to set up and manage their personalized customer engagement center. In conversation with Supportbiz, Sandeep Rattan Bhatt, National Sales Head of C-Zentrix, shares that how CRM will address constraints of SME ecosystem.

Excerpts

SB: Budget is the biggest constraint for SMEs to adopt new technologies. How budget-friendly is your technology?
Sundeep:
 One of the significant challenges that we have solved by our leading Single-box solution is to help SME customers deploy a CRM and a telephony solution all rolled in one. It became an instant hit with most of the first-time CRM solution adopters as it suited their budget and was extremely resource(s/w & h/w) light. We further modified the same solution to suit even those SME customers where the majority of the users may not need to have access to a PC to carry on with the allocated job. We called it the ‘desk-less’ agents and this I would call was a disruptive feature given the limitations of the legacy and the SMART EPBX/IPBX could not match this. The two variants still continue to be the leaders in their segment and extremely budget-friendly to the segment.

SB: What are the five trends that will rule the CRM segments in the next one year? What are the reasons?
Sundeep:
 In order to understand this trend we need to understand a broader industry trend, which is like:

Banking & Finance want to focus on key account management and organizational design
Manufacturing wants to focus on acquisition, reflecting the impact of globalization
Insurance sector showed a distinct profile of priorities towards people, brand and negotiating indicating the way the sector is dominated by broker relationships

The key connect of the above three trends is that all are pointing towards a sector specialized in CRM. The broad trends can thus be summarized as:

Currently, 90% of CRM spending is directed towards operational initiatives like sales force automation, but that will drop to 70% of spending by 2020.

Meanwhile, spending on social CRM initiatives like customer communities and social media monitoring will grow from less than 1% today to 10% of spending in 2020.

Excellent customer engagement requires the right omnichannel strategy, partner ecosystem, and technology infrastructure to meet buyers’ expectations.

(These are excerpts from an interview on supportbiz.com)

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