Email: sales@simple.works
In the world of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools, the space is dominated by major players such as Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, even Zoho. However, amidst this, one startup is trying to revolutionise the CRM space with a unique take — SimpleCRM.
We got to interact with Indraneel Fuke, Founder and CEO of SimpleCRM to understand what ignited the spark for SimpleCRM and how it’s trying to revolutionize the CRM space not just in India, but also on a global scale.
Fuke revealed how working with a US-based product company for nearly 7 years offered him the relevant experience to visualise this project, “I got the first-hand experience on building large scale enterprise software products like ERP, HRMS, Vendor Management Systems and more. I always wanted to come back and do something in India, so I migrated here in 2007 and enrolled for a 1 year-full time PGPx program at IIM-A. It was during my time at IIM-A that the seeds of entrepreneurship were sown.”
He was further mentored by one of his professors at IIM-A which made the idea for him even brighter, “In particular, there is Prof Sunil Handa who took entrepreneurship course and encouraged students to build their own ventures based in India. While I joined Tata Communications via campus placements, but the entrepreneurship bug had been sown. After a couple of months, I resigned and joined a small CRM company as a co-founder. Eventually, leveraging my experience in the enterprise software space and Asian market learning over the years, I founded SimpleCRM in November 2014.”
He also mentioned how CRM tools have been common in the US but not so much in India and how that’s changing rapidly, “While almost 90 percent of the enterprises in the US are using enterprise CRM solutions for quite some time and are on their 3rd of 4th versions the penetration of enterprise CRM solutions in Asia and especially in India would be well under 50%. Also as most Indian organizations have started their digital transformation journey in the past 4-5 years, I believe we are at the inflection point for CRM adoption.”
Fuke added, “While working for 5-6 years in an earlier venture before starting SimpleCRM, I got tremendous insights into the Asian and Indian market and it was there that I saw a major gap in CRM needs for mid to large size organisations in this region. These organisations required a top notch enterprise CRM in terms of comprehensiveness, scalability and security aspects however at the same time they needed a commercially viable model that made sense for the price-sensitive market. That was the need gap that led to the start of SimpleCRM.”
Fuke shared how SimpleCRM maintains its uniqueness in a market saturated by CRM tools, “If you compare CRM solution available today, in terms of features and functionality, it has become extremely commoditised so most players will offer similar features. The differentiation comes from other aspects such as the experience of the CRM partner in the local market. One of the biggest benefits for SImpleCRM is our Asia focus. Today on 20% of the business for international players in the CRM space comes from this region whereas for us 80% of our business comes from this region.”
He added, “Logically our product orientation, localisation capabilities, understanding of the needs of the local organisations is far ahead. Another important facet is deployment flexibility. SimpleCRM can be deployed across all clouds (including on-premise) and on an open-source stack. Very few global established CRMs can claim that.”
Indraneel explains how AI and Machine Learning are being adopted by CRM tools and how SimpleCRM harnesses the power of AI, “Today, organizations in every industry are evolving rapidly in how they interact and manage their customers. While on the other hand the customer itself is evolving both in terms of either touchpoint and their needs. Since CRM by definition is supposed to help businesses do Customer Relationship Management, CRM itself has evolved and continues to do so. AI / ML works on the premise of data and CRM solutions are a repository of customer data. So AI + CRM is actually the perfect marriage. We realized this trend a few years ago and now AI is fully incorporated into SimpleCRM solutions.”
He gave an example of the use of AI in SimpleCRM, “In-service automation we have something called a Sentiment Analyzer which captures all customer interactions through WhatsApp, calls and emails, the AI module puts a sentiment score on it. In case it detects a negative sentiment it immediately alerts the relationship manager so they can take action. Similarly, in the marketing module, we have enabled intelligent customer segmentation based on demographic and psychographic details, purchase history and online behaviour. Basis this our AI capabilities are able to do unsupervised learning thereby creating cohorts of customers or prospects. Even for our sales modules we have automated cohort analysis to find similar customers and identify cross-sell/upsell opportunities and lots more. I believe, AI capabilities will soon become a hygiene factor for top tier CRMs.”
Fuke explained how he is trying to change the CRM space little by little with the help of SimpleCRM, “I love solving problems and creating value. SimpleCRM’s digital customer engagement, the low-code platform provides an opportunity to solve business pain points of organizations and help them grow revenue and retain more customers.”
He added, “Through SimpleCRM, we are striving to build the best technology platform that offers exceptional value and helps organizations in their digital transformation journey to build stronger relationships with their customers.”
