Most of the organizations have customer data and records across departments, but how many in the company are aware of all the customer interactions that take place on a daily-basis?

To build and retain profitable relationship with a customer, it’s essential for everyone in a company to have access to the 360-degree view of customer transactions. Getting a 360-degree view is essential strategic value for organizations that want to deliver high quality customer service and support, to optimize marketing and product development. Used effectively, the 360-degree view strengthens customer retention and profitability also.

What is 360 degree view of Customer?

A 360-degree view of the customer is a single view of all customer interactions. It integrates all the customer information that is available in separate departments of an organization in to one repository. 360 Degree View is also a Business Approach which puts the customer at the center of the organization and aids a platform for quality customer service.

Impel CRM empowers you to track customer satisfaction at the most granular level possible through the 360 Degree View of Customers which seamlessly combines all of the Customer data across departments  into a single powerful, easy-to-use portal-like environment. This makes life easier, most importantly to the customer support representatives.

Benefits of Impel CRM’s 360 degree Customer View.

• Provides comprehensive view of customer across departments from marketing to sales, operations, finance, and other business functions. This helps your internal teams (marketing, sales and customer support) to collaborate easily.
• All the activities specific to a customer be it your marketing campaign emails, phone calls, follow-ups, meetings, service requests, responses and updates all of these activities gets tagged against that particular customer providing a single view.
• A 360-degree solution enables you to access consolidate customer data helping your support agents to speed up response times without having to switch between screens or await update responses from related teams.
• With the 360-degree view, you can provide a consistent and satisfying service experience for customers, as you have access to the right information instantly in a single –view. This also improves your customer interaction.
• Your call quality increases, reduces call duration which eventually saves your money.

Creating a single view for all customers is an important strategic objective. The Impel’s 360-degree approach you can replace separate functions such as call centers, customer service departments and sales by integrated in a single system with all the required data for efficiently delivering quality support to customers.

“We are using CRM software for sales and related activities. However we are not growing our business, our executives are finding this software very cumbersome and difficult to work upon. I’m in a fix whether to keep using this solution as we have invested in to this or to go for some simple, cost effective CRM software”?

Does this sound like something you’ve heard? Well that’s true!

Finding the right CRM solution that meets your requirements is one thing but getting your team to use it efficiently is a challenge. Technology alone cannot win user acceptance. The User Experience, or how easy it is for the end-user to navigate and use is the key to acceptance. While choosing a CRM for your organization you need to focus on who the end-users are. And what they are trying to do. Most importantly how effectively and easily they can work with the new software will determine whether the software gets used at all.

You will be able to grow your business only when you have a productive workforce, empowered with a simple, fast and easy-to-use CRM system. Handling CRM business processes with an easy-to-navigate interface is not only extremely convenient, but it also saves you time and money.

Welcome to the brand new look of Impel, where we’ve put the power of CRM directly in your hands. The more user-friendly, more “active” interface enables you to get your sales and marketing tasks done faster and more efficiently. The default screens are laid out to give you access to only the fields that you would require most often. The pages have a clean feel with simple menus and no confusing icons so that even occasional users can use the system without any training.

But if you need additional fields to configure Impel to your business, then go right ahead. A simple drag-and-drop interface lets you create your own fields and drop them into a layout that reflects your business. So if your sales team is used to working with paper-based forms, then you have the power to make your Impel screens look exactly like your paper forms. And you can do all this on your own with Impel’s intuitive interface; no phone calls to anyone, no more e-mails, no need to pay for customization. Impel’s new Web 2.0 interface makes your team more productive and efficient; while saving you time and money.

Today the SaaS and cloud solutions drives the CRM market, right from 8-10 percent of the CRM market in 2005 to 20 percent of the market in 2008 and now more than 95 percent of organizations expect to maintain or grow their use of software as a service (SaaS), said Gartner. SaaS and cloud CRM solutions spurred the evolution of computing — with no more software installations, no infrastructure management and no more upgrades. With SaaS and cloud CRM solutions, development and implementation can now be accomplished in a fraction of seconds as compared to days and months of deployment needed for an in-premise solution.

We offer businesses the flexibility of a unique, CRM model. Impel CRM. Impel is a web based comprehensive CRM Solution that can be accessed from anywhere in the world. The immediate benefits you see are a single repository of customer information, higher sales-per-salesperson and lower impact of salesperson turnover.  Impel gives you enterprise-class functionality at SME affordability.  With Impel, you can:

• Completely track your salespeople’s activities and contacts
• Enable everyone in your organization to achieve operational excellence with a single 360-degree view of the customer
• Increase customer acquisition, retention, loyalty, and profitability with standardized and improved sales methodologies
• Empower your sales team with real-time pipeline and forecasting to direct focus to the most profitable opportunities
• Exclusive customer portal through which your customer can reach you directly and vice versa.

In addition to the new drag and drop configurability of the user interface – the business logic behind Impel CRM is also configurable thus allowing you to easily set up the appropriate business layouts that are inherent to the application. Impel CRM is : 

• Easy to Customize and personalize
• Flexibility of mobile integration
• Hosted and multi-tenant
• User-friendly and Configurable

 Impel CRM –CCI: ( Call center Integration) 

Impel CRM CCI offers a broad range of features and functionality designed to empower agents to better respond to customer needs and requests. With Impel, businesses can improve productivity, reduce support costs, boost sales revenues, and improve customer satisfaction. Impel can be seamlessly integrated with a the telephony infrastructure. So, interactive voice response (IVR), call recording, and call routing systems can be directly linked to the CRM software. Read More…… 

Impel CRM – Mobile:  

In today’s competitive marketplace, salespeople need to be in touch with their customers and prospects 24×7. Sales Force Automation is a very important tool to beat the completion and having information on the go helps the salesperson come out on top. Impel Mobile lets salespeople manage appointments and activities, add and review account and contact information and quickly add a potential customer as a lead into Impel CRM. Integrated access to leads, opportunities, accounts, contacts and activities gives sales people the information that they need at the point of customer engagement. This helps to shorten the sales cycle and close deals quickly. ( Read More)

Impel CRM- SMS 

BY using Impel SMS your field teams can input data no matter where they are, so as an organization you will have much better control,since salespeople will be able to check on inventory level, pricing information from the customer site, they can have better control on orders. Because of the low cost of SMS, and the fact that salespeople on the field can enter orders, you anticipate a decrease in your order entry costs, Since support people can place requests for equipment right after they finish examining equipment, you feel that you can reduce customer support call cycles quite a lot. An integrated Impel SMS gets tagged with the activities for the 360 degree view of the Account ( Read More)

Your field sales representative is at your dealer’s store placing new orders with a few clicks from his mobile, directly into your CRM system. His smart phones beeps with a sms stating that a new lead is been assigned to him from his territory. On the other side your sales operations executive receives the real-time updates of the new order placed within few seconds along with complete set of details and updates of the store visit.

Wow, that’s an ultra productive sales force!  This isn’t a scene from the future. This is something that you can do right now. Thanks to Impel Mobile CRM.

When your Business has a “Feet on Street” model of sales activity, empowering your busy sales representatives is no longer a nice-to-have but must-have.  By extending Impel CRM ‘s capabilities to your  sales rep’s phone you can gain “anytime, anywhere” access to key customer information with a powerful yet easy-to-use application that increases the productivity and effectiveness of sales professionals on the road.

Key Features of  Impel Mobile CRM:

“Impel Mobile CRM” solution delivers tremendous advantages to “on the go” sales teams, allowing them to stay connected to vital customer data, no matter where they are.  Some of these are:

• Get instant CRM updates via sms.
• Access real-time account or contact details, history, and track status of opportunities, leads.
• View customer, product and prices details anytime.
• Add notes, updates to your sales activities and meetings on the fly.
• Place orders instantly from the field.
• Plan and schedule meetings and activities efficiently.
• Manage time better leading to a productive sales team.
• Respond immediately and efficiently to every opportunity, lead and request.

With Impel Mobile CRM, you can automate, simplify, and manage all the information your sales team needs with this comprehensive tool that also drives pipeline, and increases the productivity of your sales representatives.

Over the last two months, we’ve spent an enormous amount of effort into putting together a new “face” for Impel – a Web 2.0 face. Our objectives in doing this were fairly clear: we wanted a more friendly, more “active” interface that gave users a better handle on their sales- and customer-related tasks. Along the way, we also wanted to standardize the overall look-and-feel, bring out the full depth of Impel and put its power in the hands of users directly.

This has been one of our biggest frustrations, actually: we see so many things users COULD do with Impel, on their own, but had not been given the user-interfaces for. Take the example of Custom Objects. We have a customer who’s using Impel to track surveys of customer satisfaction in a chain of Chinese restaurants. The Surveys are a “custom object” in Impel, i.e. they were defined specifically for this customer, but without any real programming. We configured a bunch of flags and screens and gave the customer the ability to track something that we, as the designers of Impel, had never thought of. But unfortunately, WE had to do the configuration. We had to use the “back-end”, as we call it, to set up the flags in Impel’s database, so that the correct pages appeared in the appropriate locations on screen. It would’ve been so much simpler if the customer could’ve done this on his/her own. It would have improved the accuracy of the objects, removed the frustration that users feel in describing their needs to geeks and – as important – reduced our work. Going Web 2.0 was very clearly one way we could do that.

Armed with so many large objectives, we set off on our journey some weeks ago. First off, we decided to look at the well-done Web 2.0 apps out there. (Before we go too far, let me admit that my “definition” of Web 2.0 is probably applicable only in our own context: the use of JavaScript, AJAX, JSON, DOM and that whole alphabet-soup for creating a truly rich user experience). We saw a lot of Web 2.0 apps – everything from Apsona thru Buxfer to RememberTheMilk and Zimbra. We looked at some of the 37Signals products. We even saw competing CRM solutions that used some Web 2.0 technology in their offerings. But, I’m afraid, we found nothing that reflected anything close to our needs. You’re probably rolling eyes going “Yeah right”, but honestly, look at the factors we have to work with:

• Most of our pages have LOTS of fields. We have customers who want to see over 150 fields on a regular Contact page, tracking everything from the individual’s birthday to her sister’s name (yep, that’s a real field in one customer’s configuration). I love the clean look that a HighRiseHQ has, but there’s no way we can lay out 150 fields one below the other – users would grow old scrolling.
• Images are distracting. We began with the idea, in Impel, that users would get used to representation of certain objects by their image. For example, a bag of cash could be an icon that represents an Opportunity, telling the user to click there. Unfortunately, a number of our users found that confusing and distracting – they’d rather see a link that told them what it was for. Buxfer’s pop-out list of functions, for example, looks really neat, but I didn’t see our business users memorizing what each icon meant.
• Customers have lots of data. Users typically deal with a few thousand Contact records, lots and lots of Activities and so on. Some users have tens of thousands of Contacts, since some of our customers have over a million prospect records. Lists become critical, in that context, and I haven’t seen a reasonable presentation of that anywhere yet.
• We support lots of contextual functions. Given an Account, you can do at least six things on it (Edit, +Contact, +Activity and so on); given a Contact, even more (send SMS, send email, send as SMS…). The Buxfer model works well for showing contextual menus, but images are probably not descriptive enough for a business user.
• Multi-tenancy has its implications. Even in a simple thing as a SmartSuggest list where, say, we want to show a list of Dealers that an Opportunity can be assigned to, we have different definitions of what constitutes a “Dealer”, depending on our customer. Some customers allow Opportunities, Quotes, Orders, etc. to be assigned to Dealers only, some to Distributors also and so on. That’s a complexity not typical in today’s Web 2.0 apps, since it’s mostly about a complex data model manifesting itself in a JSON front-end.
• We don’t use a local data-store. Thanks to the volume of data, its security, the complexity of each record and so on, we rejected the idea of a local store like Google Gears. And this is a multi-user, multi-company system anyway, so the stuff that users see needs to be fairly current. We have users that watch inbound leads from their websites on their Call Center page, so going back to the server in most cases is a necessity.

All this is not to take away from what’s out there. In fact, if we’ve done a good job, it’s only because we “stood on the shoulders of giants”, like Newton said. Apsona, for example, demonstrates very well the use of JavaScript and related client-side technologies for a great Corporate User Experience.

Net effect, we learnt a lot and implemented things the way we saw it work for our users. We added the ability for users to manage their own custom fields. Users can also lay out their pages the way they want to see them. And they can share their page definitions, so everyone doesn’t have to recreate their preferences. For the more aesthetically-inclined, we even have a selection of themes to work with. Along the way, we also fixed a number of irritants in our earlier user interface (yes, your filter is remembered now!). And, we had to kill off – at least temporarily – some of the things we had in there earlier. The Expand capability on most lists, for example – that’s something we’ll reintroduce in some time now.

Overall, though, we believe we’ve done a good job on rebuilding the Impel user interface. Lots more to be done – preemptive list downloads, but we’ll be able to do that faster now, since we have a single JavaScript front-end for all the new pages. Go on, give it a spin, tell us what you think of it all. Just remember the most important four-letter-word in software – Beta!

As said in my previous blog “SaaS the Best Fit for SMB’s”,  SaaS has being an increasingly adopted tool for small businesses.  SaaS is a concept that allows you to “Consume” software on a subscription basis as a “Service”,  instead of the traditional expensive model.

There are a number of benefits to be gained from the SaaS platform for both small business and individual users and this article reveals the “Take Aways” and the best of the reasons/benefits for switching to a SaaS solution for your software needs.

• Anytime Anywhere Access:

One of the greatest advantages of SaaS Application is the freedom it provides you in terms of where and when you choose to work or access the application data stored. It’s the providers business to deliver seamless access of application to their clients anytime, anywhere increasing the overall productivity. Also the service provider ensures that the data is safer than it would be if it was to be stored on your computer.

• Automatic Upgrades:

One will always have the latest version whenever you access your SaaS applications, because there is always only one version available all time.  This also means that the service provider is capable of quickly making changes within matter of hours if an error is found d in the software without causing any impact to your business.

• Cost Effectiveness:

We know that finding the right solution also means finding one that makes economic sense for your business. With SaaS model deployment,  software is subscribed and not purchased. Therefore expenses are not front loaded (Zero Capex) and are made up of predictable monthly fees. The biggest cost savings actually come from the reduction in manpower and the IT resources (servers, databases etc) required maintaining the applications in-house. There are also considerable savings from other areas such as reduced or no implementation, up-gradations costs.

• Customizable Interface:

Leveraging the power of Software as a Service (SaaS),  you can customize IT to fit your business  rather than fitting your business to what the software can provide.  The ability to modify functionality and processes in SaaS applications are more quickly and in a more iterative way than the traditional software model and specifically tailored to meet your preferences. This also means that the Business can operate more efficiently and align their process strategically to seize more competitive advantage.

• Not Platform Specific:

It does not matter whether the computer you are using runs on MAC, Windows or Linux, as long as you are able to use a browser and access the internet then you can access your  SaaS application with a fewer clicks. The majority of SaaS applications are not browser specific. This also makes it far easier to switch platforms if one desires.

Overall, SaaS model offers you rapid deployment, enterprise-class functionality and reliability, all-inclusive of maintenance and upgrades and a reduced burden on your IT resources — all at a low subscription price!!! These are huge knock-on effects of adopting SaaS solutions.  Software as a Service (SaaS) is the future of business application software, Empower your business by adopting SaaS applications !!!

About Impel CRM:

Impel CRM is an integrated CRM solution that lets you put your customer at the center of your business. Available in different editions, covering every aspect of sales force automation, marketing automation, customer service automation. Its comprehensive functionality is built to accelerate sales. Enriched by features like sales activity planning, E2E consumer marketing, SMS integration, and Call Center Management makes Impel CRM an empowered and easy to deploy on-demand CRM solution.

For more information, Please visit http://www.impelcrm.in

According to the recent surveys on SaaS adoptions, the Small to Medium Businesses (SMB’s) looks more set and open to experiment with SaaS offerings.

As per  Gartner’s Report, SaaS systems have made significant inroads in satisfying the SMB market and not surprisingly, analysts expect the strongest growth in SaaS applications (specifically CRM) spending to come from Asia/Pacific, where revenue forecasts presume to grow from $410 million in 2007 to $840 million in 2012.

The Springboard survey also highlights that the Asian small and mid-size business (SMB) market is the sole market dominated, by local and inexpensive SaaS vendors. Analysts suggest that local vendors will often prevail over the large Western software companies due to software localization requirements in the SMB sector.

The findings highlight that the SaaS deployments are no longer considered a newer model of deployment due to the level of acceptance seen in the end-users, which also suggest growing opportunities for SaaS adoptions.

With the numerous advantages like superior ROI, zero-capex mode, lowered TCO,  reduced AMC’s, easier and hassle free up gradations,  higher up-time,  customizable interface,  faster implementation along with deeper functionalities makes  SaaS  “The Best  Fit” for the SMB segments as this  segment usually strive hard to cope up with the cost implications to meet  the business standards.

The subscription based mode with “pay as you go” has got the momentum around SaaS is accelerating and is a boon for SMB’s.

Also the extensive usage of Smartphone’s, Internet, and notepads has revolutionized  the software climate which has witnessed a drastic change in terms of developing new technology and its adoption. These new technologies are amongst the biggest reasons for SaaS adoption by SMB’s.

Net net, SMB is a major segment seeing a constant growth and SaaS solutions are custom made solutions for the SME segments to leverage the advantages at a much lower Total Cost of Ownership

Last night, my wife and I went to a movie at this spanking new mall in Malleswaram. One of the best food courts I’ve seen (Huh? But you went to a movie, you say? But of course! How can you see a movie without pigging out?!), very airy, lots of varieties of food, nice little umbrellas on tables – and lots of tables piled high with trash. I am not kidding – by 2100, over 90% of the 100-odd tables had uncleared trash. People were walking around with trays laden with food, desperately trying to find a table that was clean. The airyness was overwhelmed by the smell of regurgitated chicken from this American brand that seems to have no real reason for its popularity in spice-laden India. And there I was, thinking: “Hmm, this looks like an in-premise sale.”

I have to admit that, like the old Vedic Masters who see God in everything around them, I see SaaS issues everywhere. The realtor that built the Mall spent tons of money, the architect put huge effort into it, so much marketing went into getting us in there – all to naught. Because the cleaners had not been efficient enough to clear trash. Because some of the users of the Mall had no idea how to take out their own trash anyway. Much like a user of an in-premise solution where the local IT team did not have the same lofty objectives as the software designer.

But really, these factors about why SaaS scores over In-premise are very well documented on the Web. Very simply, we agonize over Usage, while In-premise software companies agonize over Sales. Over the last few days, though, I’ve been in a series of discussions not about how SaaS is different from In-premise but about how some SaaS companies differ from other SaaS companies. The discussions were triggered by an excellent piece by Brian Sommer in ZDNet, about what he calls a “SaaS-querade” of vendors. All this online and offline talk has egged me into putting a stake in (no, not the hearts of some of the speakers!) the ground, about what I think SaaS is GOING TO BE all about.

For those who came in late (a la Phantom comics), SaaS stands for “Software-as-a-Service”, where you buy and use fairly complicated software completely on the Web. The most direct benefits are fairly clear – no CapEx on the customer’s part, low up-front cost delivering high value immediately, tremendous ease of implementation and so on. But I think this is just the beginning – the “true” value of SaaS is only just beginning to be recognized. IMHO, over time, there are a few other benefits that some SaaS vendors will deliver – and those are the ones that will grow well. Here they are.

• The first, most important value a good SaaS company will deliver is constantly-increasing value via seamless upgrades. That’s a mouthful, so let me explain. With Impel, every four weeks or so, customers see some minor, some major enhancements that they can choose to use. The upgrades are non-intrusive in that they won’t get in the way of what you’re used to doing with Impel, but they usually will give you a better way of doing that. Or they will give you a whole new “thing” you can do. For example, we have this ability to send and receive email from within Impel. Emails sent to and received from a Contact are tagged with that Contact record, so anyone reviewing that Contact can see them in the context of any other Activities you may have had with that Contact – phone calls, meetings, etc. That’s just a new tab – and you can choose not to enable it. So a very powerful new feature just appears magically – and you can choose to make it go away it if you don’t need it. The point here is not about how well the tech is done but about the fact that the functional breadth and depth of your subscription keeps growing over time. It’s like buying a Tata Ace for your transport business and that magically turning into a Tata LPS 4923 as your business grows.
• A true SaaS company will deliver uptime and reliability as a life-and-death issue – for them, not just for their customers. They’ll do this via something called “multi-tenancy”. Multi-tenancy is tech-speak for a system where we run ONE large “instance” of software for ALL our customers. So whether a user from large consumer goods manufacturer with hundreds of users is logging in or someone with two salespeople in Jhumritalaiya, they access the SAME software (with a bunch of fail-over background servers, of course). Now, why is that important to you as a user, apart from a vague sense of democracy? I’ll explain: implemented as a core element of our software, this means that the software has to be up and effective for EVERY user of the system, not just for a few customers. So there’s no way I can tell one customer that hey, OK, your software is down and someone is working on it; if your software is down, so is everyone else’s. And I am being beaten on by EVERY customer by the minute. In comparison to a non-multi-tenant model where each customer gets a separate instance, the multi-tenant model now moves Uptime from a Nice-to-have to a Critical-for-business issue for me, the vendor. That means we do whatever it takes to keep our software running and responding in seconds, something companies with other delivery models are not incentivised to do.

If you’re a devious thinker like me, I’m sure you’re going: “OK, so if all this puts so much pressure on you, why are you, my dear fellow, putting so much effort into building this thing called multi-whatever?” I’ll tell you: because, without multi-tenancy, it would be Hell to roll out those upgrades I speak of above. Clearly, it is cheaper for us to run that ONE instance for hundreds of users than to run multiple instances for different customers, if we have to provide that continuing value enhancement. So there you have it: multi-tenancy is better for you and cheaper for us – a marriage made in Heaven!

• Now that I’ve made such a big case for multi-tenancy, let me go further and say that’s not enough (hmm, now why does that sound like an issue in some marriages, too?). SaaS companies will need to support separate, identical databases what’s called “mega-tenancy” also. This is tech-speak for a way in which, while there’s still just one large instance of our software, we can give you your own database in our network. That puts full-scale back-end IT infrastructure in place for you – you can now get full back-ups of your data, peel them off to a CD, put them in remote storage for compliance, scratch that paranoid itch about commingling data, whatever. Of course, an In-premise vendor will immediately jump up and say “We can do that too!” Of course they can, but without the other advantages of SaaS, I am only reminded of that smart-alec line: “Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”
• The fourth and biggest value of “true SaaS” is Customization, something most SaaS vendors shy away from currently in very innovative ways. For example, one of our competitors has a large set of Wiki entries titles “Customizing <bleep> CRM”. That’s terrific – till you read what’s in there. It’s a bunch of Configuration instructions – stuff that you can do on your own. Ask them if they can change a call-center workflow for them and they’ll hum and haw. That’s because, I think, of the WAY these apps have been built. Being Circa 2000 apps, their support of multi-tenancy is an early architecture, not planning for handing custom functions for some users. With the advent of newer development platforms that natively support multi-tenancy, Customization becomes as easy as Configuration. And with the integration of an in-house development team that takes full responsibility for that customization, the SaaS company now becomes truly responsive to everything that your business needs as it grows and changes. This is particularly important in a growing marketplace like India, where our customers are constantly trying new, innovative ways to reach out to their customers. They constantly need changes to the way Impel works – and we make those changes. Most SaaS technologies will tell you that that’s just not possible in a multi-tenant model – we’ll tell you it is. That’s not because we’ve done anything dramatically Earth-shaking in our design – we’ve just architected Impel in a manner where we do support deep Customization, apart from a high degree of Configuration, in our single instance-multiple-database offering.

From a tech-architecture stand-point (non-techies can stop reading now), there are a number of descriptions on the web that talk of similar things. One of the clearest I’ve seen is Kunal Mittal’s description, taking you from the non-SaaS world to a Maturity Model 4. IMHO, there’s at least a Maturity Model 5 coming – one that supports items 3 and 4 above. Kunal probably sees that already!

So there’s the extent of my crystal-ball-gazing, albeit somewhat tainted by our own software design. Now, if I can tell you how the Mall business will grow, I could well have a chance to apprentice with Donald Trump himself!

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had some terrible skirmishes and some terrific experiences with vendors. The skirmishes have been with a hosting provider of a non-profit I do some work with (you may be interested if you’re into Politics – www.dakshindia.org), our BSE-listed domain registrar and, of course, our bank. In one case, I was told I can take my business elsewhere; in another, the agent hung up on me – twice. Yes, I’ve heard the lament that Customer Service in India is terrible, but I’ve had bad experiences with our US hosting provider, to (talking to a “Susan” who was most certainly NOT someone in Gurgaon with an American accent). I think the issue is not nationality – it is corporate culture. A large number of today’s senior managers grew up at the tail end of the License Raj, in a seller’s market. Further, that market was all about products, not services, where “goods once sold are not taken back”. So the general mentality has been that Customer Service is something you HAVE to do, not something you WANT to do. Add the cultural impact of Call Centers, unfortunately identified with outsourced Customer Service, being night-time jobs and that only makes the function that much more disliked. So it is no wonder that some Indian organizations (do I hear you say “most” vehemently?) don’t see Customer Service as something they must do well.

I want to report, though, that there ARE organizations that do a good job of it, causing the terrific experiences that I spoke of. One recent example is an experience with Reva, our electric car. We’ve had it for over four years now, using it nearly every day, very happy about it. The interesting thing is, if you ask me the problems of a Reva, I can list several. Passengers sit REAL close together; the doors don’t close properly; the suspension is terrible; the back window does not lock well; the windows leak when it rains… I can go on. But ask my wife or me if we like the vehicle and we will unequivocally say “Yes”. That’s because of one very important reason – Customer Service. The Reva guys follow up for service, they pick up the car and return it from maintenance, they charge a few hundred bucks (Rupees, not Dollars) for each service and so on. Essentially, with all the problems with the Product, we still like it because of the Service that we get.

With Impel, too, we see similar situations. Prospects sometimes ask us why it is that Impel is not as “friendly” as its competitors in, say, configuring pages, new fields and new objects. But customers for the most part tell me very clearly that they truly like our Customer Service. Users refer to our Service personnel by name, speak about continuity among them and generally talk positively about their interactions with us. And for us, each conversation with a user is an opportunity to understand what they are trying to achieve and why. So we get deep insight in customers’ businesses – insight that helps us build new services and new revenue options.

So that’s my point about Customer Service – that it is not a Cost but an Opportunity. An opportunity to correct Product faults in the consumer’s mind. An opportunity to identify new features for our product. And, most importantly, an opportunity to find new sales leads. So there, I’ve let the cat out of the bag: our Customer Service is good because that’s good for US as much as for our users. Now, is that such a bad thing?!