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!

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?!

Recently, we lost a customer database. Yes, we lost it – multiple servers crashed, backups were corrupted and so on: net effect, one particular customer lost all their data. But that’s not the point of this story, because we recovered all their data, bringing them back to Production in 24 hours. The point of this story is about perspectives – how people behave in a given situation and what we can learn from that. After all, a good CRM is all about reflecting human behaviour!

So anyway, like I said, we lost the database late one night, after the customer’s users (a call center that truly tests our cluster performance) had knocked off for the day. Our engineers identified the issue right away, worked through the night and got things ship-shape. Along the way, our Engineering Manager was talking to a number of people who were affected by the outage – and some who were not. The first person we called early in the morning was the manager who runs the call center. You know what his reaction was? He said (in Tamil): “OK, so you think you’ll get all my data back. But how are you going to deal with your other customers?” Luckily for us, it was only his mega-tenant database that was affected, but the way he asked that question, it very obvious that he was truly concerned – for us. He was worried that we would be under the gun with lots of other people. And he was expressing his solidarity with us in the most direct way possible. That really got me thinking: after all, at the end of the day, we are vendors to him. His feeling worried about our future is a reflection of his trust of us as a vendor, so that’s heartening. But his feeling for us as individuals is much more important: it is a reflection of his bigness of heart. And that’s not just heartening, it is inspiring.

Another call that Partha (our Engg Mgr) made was to a relative – a relative whom I have never met, but to whom Partha has spoken about me in passing. His reaction was very different – and as interesting. He asked: “Did Kishore yell at you?” To him, coming from the more traditional work-environments that he has seen, the reaction of the “boss” was critical. Partha’s response to that question is as inspiring as our customer’s – he said “No, but that’s not the point; we should be worried about the customer, not about Kishore.” Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m sure I can be nearly as nasty as Hari Sadu if I try. And I’m sure Partha knows that. But his response showed true professional maturity: when such a crisis occurs, one must worry more about how the customer is affected than about how one’s own boss will react. Partha’s belief is that focusing on the customer is better for his career than focusing on his boss. And it’s better for his boss’ career, too!

Net effect, a lot of learning, not the least about the technology we work with. But that’s what’s fun about our SaaS CRM business: we learn interesting things even in the adversity of a server crash!

Nearly every time one of us presents Impel to larger prospects, one key question that comes up is “How about customization?” Impel is very configurable and provides many ways of doing things without paying for custom work, but there come times when customization is inevitable. Particularly for the medium- or large-sized business that has processes in place – the CRM solution needs to reflect at least some of that. And that needs customization. There’s the 64-lakh-Rupee question – Kaun banega programmer? We guys, who own the product? Or a partner whom we appoint? The way the market works, companies that own products don’t take on customization. They hand that off to partners who will make the product work exactly the way you, dear customer, want it to work. That’s the way VCs like product companies to execute, too – build the overall product and let partners work with customers. That way, you’ll build an “eco-system” around your product. Lots of programmers out there, working for lots of software companies, will be singing paeans to your technology, since their own livelihood is tied to your product. What could be better for a product company?

The question, IMHO, is not what is better for the product company but what is better for the customer. The partner has paid gobs of money to be “certified” on the product and his/her livelihood stems from the hours s/he puts on the work. So s/he has a built-in bias to raise rates and increase custom-work hours. The increase in hours may not happen intentionally, but let’s face it, the partner is a service provider and would like to take as little risk as possible in estimating a job. And, having already signed up for the product, there’s little risk that the customer refuses to work with that partner. So it’s not surprising that “implementation” takes twice the money that “license” or “subscription” does. Net effect, there’s a whole eco-system built – on the customer’s money and time.

Here at PK4, we take a different approach, something we call “Principal-driven Customization”. We take on complete responsibility, both for the Subscription and for the Customization. And we do that for the many years that the customer uses Impel. We do involve partners, but they either sell Impel or provide us contract resources – they do not estimate an implementation and then bill the customer. So we have a very strong bias to keep the customization work low, for the following reasons:

• We begin with the premise that, if Impel is not valuable as it is for at least half the work-force planning to use it, it is not a good fit for an SME. Being able to configure – not customize – Impel in a couple of days for half our prospect’s users is a critical barometer for the ultimate success of our implementation. Compared to their large-company colleagues, SME managers are typically more cost-conscious and less willing to wait for custom work to complete. So our ability to provide “immediate gratification” is very important.
• We are in the business of SaaS Subscriptions, not Custom Services. So our intent is always to reduce the amount of custom work we do for a specific customer and, instead, build generic solutions that we can use in various contexts. While this takes more thinking, it actually takes less work overall, since the people who do the thinking are the people who built the product in the first place.
• Because we think of each requirement as being applicable to multiple contexts, we also wind up charging for less hours in any piece of custom work we do. After all, we know that every piece of code we write for a customer will ultimately increase the value of our intellectual property.
• We recognize that the more we delay an implementation, the less we make on the subscription. And subscriptions are what we’re after as a company. So we work hard – and smart – to get our customers up and running as quickly as we can. And we do that by using a combination of configuration and customization.
• The traditional wisdom is that product companies must not “sully their hands” with services, but we believe that such an idea is irrelevant in the Indian context. Here, people have built huge, very successful, hugely valuable companies in the Services space. They’ve obviously done something right! Being worried about having a large workforce is typical in a Western context, where the cost-to-company of most employees runs to over $ 100,000. Even with the galloping salaries in India, we’re not yet there yet, recession-proof growth notwithstanding!
• Ultimately, regardless of all the theorizing, we believe that if it helps our customers grow, it is a good thing to do. And our taking on the onus of custom work is good for our customers, not only when they sign up but later, too, when their businesses grow and they want to do more with their CRM. Yes, it puts pressure on us to deliver not just a robust CRM solution but one that is customized, too. But that’s part of the deal – if it’s good for customers, we’ll do it.

Our approach to customization, then, is similar to our approach to our product: Make it work in the Indian context. So here’s what our engineers will say when someone asks about customization: Main hoon na.

Of late, we’ve seen a couple of interesting prospect responses comparing SaaS and In-premise software. One is the idea that SaaS and In-premise work out to about the same cost over the “long run”. The other is that in-premise vendors, too, include updates to their software, much like SaaS vendors do. We didn’t see these arguments earlier, since we largely sell on a “pull” model and not a “push” one – prospects will have worked out the benefits of SaaS over In-premise before they talk to us. But in the bigger deals, managers bring up these issues in conversations – to beat us down on price, if nothing else! In one case, a prospect told us that an in-premise competitor had quoted Rs. 30,000 per seat plus Maintenance. When questioned about TCO compared to SaaS, the other sales guy sagely (Oops! Freudian slip!) said that “over three years we’ll all wind up costing about the same – I can send you an Excel spreadsheet about it”. Now, I normally don’t react to this kind of crap, since it is so obviously untrue I’d be wasting your time talking about it. And there’s so much detail out there in the web, I’d be wasting electronic ink repeating it all. But this time, it kind of got to me, primarily because of the “update” issue. Here’s why.

Yes, with in-premise software, you do get updates if you buy the Annual Maintenance Contract. But you don’t get upGRADES – what you get are bug-fixes, not enhanced or new features. And that’s a big difference. In-premise software vendors deliver “minor upgrades”, including bug fixes, as part of their AMCs. A major upgrade, though, is priced separately and can run anywhere from 50% to 100% of the original price. So every couple of years, after having faithfully paid for the updates every year, you get socked for nearly your original price for the upgrade. And then you have to deal with the nightmares of installing that upgrade. So much so that companies choose to not upgrade at all till they absolutely have to – they’re that afraid of upgrades upending their business.

With SaaS, on the other hand, both updates and upgrades are incremental and part of the price. So you never wind up having to deal with upgrade nightmares – the vendor does that for you automatically. Hmm, maybe that’s the problem in the comparison – how do you put a value to sleepless nights in Excel?

I’m not done yet – I’m now going to argue that that the amount of additional functionality that you get in a given time-frame from a SaaS vendor is much higher than that from an in-premise vendor. This is not because the SaaS vendor is somehow more committed to his/her business than the in-premise vendor (although that is true of this particular SaaS vendor). It is because the SaaS vendor by design has to deal with lesser operational issues than does the in-premise vendor. With SaaS, we don’t worry about a DLL not registering on someone’s server or a stored procedure not installing on someone’s database. We don’t agonize about a database upgrade script failing because of permissions somewhere, or about needing to do the upgrades within a short-enough time-frame for business not to be affected. The in-premise vendor, poor soul, has to deal with all these issues and more. With all that, s/he has to build truly-useful functionality that customers will like and use. And software is much like pregnancy – putting more people on the job will not necessarily reduce delivery time-frames or increase effectiveness. So it’s not surprising that, in a given time-frame, a SaaS vendor delivers a lot more value than does an equivalent in-premise vendor, updates and upgrades included.

So here’s my suggestion to you if you’re considering your next business app purchase: the pivotal thing is to not be sage about the decision; look at the micro issues and don’t be soft about the questions!