CIOInsider India Magazine

In digitopia, customers are smarter. The mere delivery of products & services wouldn’t cut it for them. It’s not that conventional brand loyalty paradigms don’t matter now, but doing business is much more than that nowadays. As indicated by a recent study (by lithium.com), for 83 percent of the customers across the globe and industries, it’s of paramount importance how brands treat them while delivering the product. 73 percent of them are willing to even pay more for a product if they love the brand experience. That’s a groundbreaking insight into the criticality of customer experience. Customers entail quality deliverables tightly wrapped with holistic, yet personalized experiences, and presently, there is no way around a cutting edge CRM solution to provide this.

If you look around, it’s not hard to see that the most successful brands in today’s digital era are those that have figured out a way to reinterpret every

customer touch point, and in turn to deliver a proposition based on experience and emotional connection. They are also starting to make sense out of data generated by their CRM platform and in turn more informed decisions. According to Grand View Research, the global CRM market size was valued at $40.2 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 14.2 percent from 2020 to 2027. It also implicates that the driving factors of the industry is the growing demand for Software as a Service (SaaS) in CRM deployment suites and solutions. Even amidst the pandemic, digital transformed companies optimize their CRM tools to create a win-win situation. While customers savor what they want, the companies find themselves a new avenue to recognize the right customers, engage in manual & automated interactions with them, and generate personalized meticulous reports in a highly organized manner.

In India, although the pace of the CRM market’s growth is not up to the global mark, it still records a steady growth trajectory. A new report by data and analyst firm GlobalData divulges that the overall spending on CRM in India is set to reach around $2.3bn in 2023. It also says that the CRM applications segment is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 3.3 percent during the forecast period. The picture around these numbers implicates the fact that the companies that are able to benefit from technologies like AI and NLP are at the forefront of the race.

But is it really a plug and play situation? Absolutely not! If organizations undergo digital transformation without thinking it through, it more often than not leads to a blind alley. For instance, if they start small and step up their transformation en route to the future, there is a great chance that they end up with multiple digital partners and plenty of applications across different functional departments that don’t talk to each other. This means they are probably entering in data more than once, and the investment is failing to come back with a comprehensive overview and optimized output. This is why partner selection becomes more important than ever before. The organizations, especially startups and small businesses, need to know their own requirements before migrating to a CRM solution.