Raj Mruthyunjayappa, managing director, Talisma Corporation Pvt Ltd, cannot contain his excitement while talking about social media sites such as Twitter, Second Life and YouTube, which he calls “communication on steroids.”
“This is the future of all marketing and is set to take online business by storm,” the head of the customer relationship management (CRM) software firm says.
It is something he intends to exploit for a larger share of the CRM market.
The CRM market, estimated at $8-9 billion globally, is pegged at just $70-80 million in India, though predicted to clock a CAGR of 30-35% over the next few years. It has been logging one of the highest growth rates in the world, making it the third-largest market in the Asia-Pacific region.
But the latest buzz in enterprise in the CRM space is Social CRM, riding on the Web 2.0 wave. While it has been talked about for some time now, it is only recently that many companies are beginning to see the benefits of having a social networking presence on the Web.
For instance, thanks to some aggressive monitoring of Twitter, Infosys Technologies was recently able to address the concerns of a prospective client who had posted a query on the micro-blogging site asking for validation of the work culture at India’s second largest IT services company.
Likewise, Wipro and Cisco are already on Web 2.0 social networking sites to run their innovation centres and bring together disparate experts.
This is precisely what Talisma wants to leverage with tools that integrate social media sites with latest generation enterprise resource planning software.
There are no estimates of how large the social media business is or how large its potential is, save for the fact that it is bound to change the way corporations use it to interface with customers, he says, adding, the world is 5-10 years away from monetising social media in the real sense. But Talisma will be ready whenever that happens, says Mruthyunjayappa.
Apart from customer relations, Social CRM will also be the main tool for reputation management by companies with proactive measures thanks to the data and site scrubbing engines such products are bundled with.
“By the end of this year, we will have the first generation Social CRM products in the market, which will be targeted across verticals, but predominantly for B2C transactions,” says Mruthyunjayappa. He is loath to giving out more detail as the company is in the process of filing patents for the new tool.
“We have already tried and tested the software, which is integrated with Facebook and Twitter into the product on which nearly eight months of R&D has already been done,” he says. The product will be bundled with Talisma CRM, he adds.
While the initial product will use client information available in the public domain over the Web, later versions will use advanced image and voice discovery engines for better customer relations. For instance, next generation interactive voice recognition systems will be able to pop up the complete history of the client the moment he says hello on the telephone, putting information at the finger tips of the executive handling the call.
Likewise, going ahead, a mere picture will be enough to match profiles on the internet for deeper information retrieval from various sources, he says.
Late last year, the privately held Talisma was acquired by US-based educational infrastructure and process management software company Campus Management Corp for an unspecified sum.
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