There is a great shift from multichannel to omnichannel

Businesses in India want to adopt technology which is open and flexible. Indian customers are willing to adopt technology and willing to pay a price for it too, explains KT Prasad, Country Sales Director, Zendesk.

Do you see any difference in the Indian market in the way it adopts CRM solutions?

From an Indian perspective, I think we have not changed any product or any of the needs. The global and local needs are very similar. Because I see even the customers in India want to be driving the customer-centric approach, whether it’s the digital natives or new companies like Ola, or old businesses and traditional companies like ITC. They see how digital disruption can affect the industry and the businesses. Now maybe in Ola because it’s completely digital native, you brought in a CRM system and you put in one system for all. In larger companies and enterprises, when you bring in a CRM, they might have other solutions working in silos.

Then there are open and flexible solutions we have to offer. You can plug-and-play your voice technology. You can plug it into technology or your business applications to really have a customer conversation and drive relationships. So I think those are things which we have seen differently. The way the large and small companies are offering, but we do not need to make any changes to a product except the call solution.

India is highly regulated for calling. So we partnered with local partners who can provide the voice technology. When a customer looks at it, they look at voice. They look at chat or email or any social channels or a messaging platform. So the voice technology is what we partner in India, but when it comes to the rest, the customer gets to use the complete suite of products.

Has the Indian market been particularly difficult to crack? Are Indian companies willing to pay for such solutions?

What we’ve seen is that businesses in India want to adopt technology which is open and flexible. I think if you look at the traditional software, then you sell the software and disappear. But from the SaaS perspective, we look at the long term value of a customer. We look at the customer as being at a churn risk. A customer can actually sign up for a month, or maybe for a year, or you can stay for longer. So he has so many options with them. The onus is on companies like Zendesk to provide innovation and really compelling technology that can make a difference to the customer experience.

Because of those approaches, it's been working beautifully for us. We have not seen any resistance. We hear that India is a price sensitive market. But it was probably applicable in the olden times. In the new times, if you can drive business value and if you can improve customer experience methods for the business, customers are willing to adopt technology and willing to pay a price for it too.

What are the India trends for CRM?

Many India trends are similar to global trends. But most customers and businesses in India are moving towards omnichannel, and they will definitely see how it is different from multichannel. The customers are integrating all the messaging technologies like WhatsApp. In fact WhatsApp has been very revolutionary in India. We have 400-500 million smartphone devices, growing at a very rapid pace. Most of the telecom companies today offer data at a fraction of the cost. At $2 a month, you get unlimited data that consumers are struggling to spend.

Consumers are spending more time on social like WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter. Customers have a voice today. Earlier the consumer could send you a business email or make a phone call. But today they can go straight to Twitter. So it becomes important for businesses not to see their brand to be dampened. You want to make sure that the customer experience is constantly increasing. AI is also playing a role.

We are advising customers to actually simple knowledge base that is a foundation to really create a great AI experience. But the some of the businesses are in a hurry to put in bots. But some of them don’t have their foundation right. So we see them coming back and asking about the right path for them. They can then use bots-AI-ML to self-service customers.