Social CRM: Changing The CRM We Know Today

Traditionally CRM was used for facilitating dialogue between companies and their customers as well as sales teams. Social CRM and Mobile CRM are building a whole new paradigm and changing the way we know CRM today. Doug Erickson, Vice President- Asia Pacific, SugarCRM in conversation with Biztech2.com delves into what is driving this change and how.

How is the scenario changing with respect to adoption of Social CRM?

Few years back when we were talking about Social CRM, there were not many takers for it. Today, both enterprises and consumers are constantly engaging in Social CRM. Our collaboration with networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn give our customers an extra edge by getting to know end customers personally. To draw a simple definition, Social CRM is a networking tool which companies use to integrate with their customers.

Traditionally CRM was used only to draw customer information from their accounts or interaction history. This led to the data being stored in files and spreadsheets and not in a centralised location. Today, companies want to know more about their customers in terms of their personal characteristics. With SugarCRM, customers not only get to access information in the traditional CRM space but also the social information. One can follow customers’ tweets, posts and decide on how to cash on the same.

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What will it take to push its adoption in the Indian market?

Simple and custom made solutions will automatically help increase the adoption rate. Traditionally CRM systems were built to give management a view of their sales team in terms of productivity, targets, calls, etc. This created a negative thought process and we found out that sales teams across different companies were hesitating to use any new CRM tool. They found it to be too complex.

What we have done in our solution is to simplify, use open standards and custom make it for each company so that the solution can adapt to the respective company’s nature of work. Social CRM equips enterprises with tools to source relevant data on their customers. This data can be used further used to create sales opportunities.

Can you elaborate on the cloud connectors that you launched last year?

We use cloud connectors to connect to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other such sites. They are built in such a way that customers can write their own definition on cloud. We foresee that in the coming years cloud connectors will become a necessity. SugarCRM has also recently released a chat facility where a particular company gets live feed on their customers and can instantly connect with them.

You also offer Mobile CRM. Where does it fit into the whole enterprise mobility paradigm?

There are three critical factors when we talk about enterprise mobility - first is the ability to access data, second is connecting devices, and third is compatibility between devices and application. The issue with most mobile connections is that they are slow with an everlasting dependency on Internet connectivity. And, the native applications on mobile devices require Internet connection. However, having uninterrupted Internet connectivity is impossible especially when roaming charges are expensive.

SugarCRM gives the ability to access data without using network, and on any smartphones using mobile browsers and extended browsers like Windows. Mobile CRM can work with tablets as well. One can even store data locally on a mobile device and have offline ability to access this without Internet connection. Once it connects to the Internet, the data automatically syncs in, hence no work disruption is caused. The tool automatically updates the server and as an administrator one can wipe out the data if it gets lost.