Open Source Powered CRM has Become an Intelligent Tool to Drive Customer Engagement

In an exclusive conversation with Voice&Data, Dr Devasia Kurian, CEO, *astTECS, talks about Enterprise Telephony space and how is mobile cloud telephony helping enterprises and SMEs reduce infrastructure investments. Excerpts:

Q. What are the key market opportunities you see today in for Open Source based Enterprise Telephony space?

Open Source and new ICT technologies are changing the way we work and live, at the same time it has given rise to a wave of innovative technologies that are bringing boundless changes to businesses. Driving greater collaboration and faster innovation, Open Source solutions are at the forefront of successful enterprise deployment, creating innovative enterprise applications in a highly cost-effective manner.

Adoption of enterprise mobility, Open Source CRM, video conferencing, collaboration and cloud present vast opportunities, moreover government-led projects like Make in India and Digital India is also creating great opportunities for the industry and large-scale projects.

The evolution and maturity of Open Source in the enterprise telephony space have resulted in improved customer engagement & efficiency, increased conversions, augmented employee productivity, accelerated deliveries, reduced costs and higher revenue potential.

Q. How is Mobile Cloud Telephony helping Enterprises and SMEs reduce infrastructure investments and improved efficiencies?

Mobile Cloud Telephony delivers carrier-grade communication on a cloud platform and its flexibility, functionality and agility offer an array of benefits. Mobile Cloud Telephony compounds the competence of cloud and mobile technology to create a distinctive product that completely eliminates the ICT infrastructure requirements of a call centre operation in the premises. As workers bring their own devices (BYOD) to the workplace and with increased emergence and requirement of remote offices, home office workers and teleworkers, this collaboration bundle is designed to deliver how businesses communicate effectively and workforces are optimized, to shape-up and deliver differentiated customer experience.

Mobile Cloud Telephony is a plug-and-play technology best suited for domestic contact centres, start-ups, special purpose campaigns, pilot campaigns and businesses who want to concentrate on using voice-as-a-tool to enable better business performance and operate on OPEX model.

Q. Organizations are excited about the Unified Communication as they see a lot of potentials. How is Unified Communication changing the business ecosystem in India? What are the latest trends of UC market?

As cloud, mobile application & integration, video collaboration and social media becoming integral elements in the enterprise IT infrastructure, Unified Communication offer tremendous capabilities, since the integration of communication systems augments customer collaboration and employee productivity. Unified Communication solutions are creating a connected ecosystem to integrate multiple end-points delivering fully integrated set of applications, helping organizations to simplify the process and deliver exciting & newer possibilities.

Also, Cloud-based services for Unified Communication and hosted model offers tremendous convenience to mid-size organizations. These are less expensive to deploy, significantly enhances businesses edge by increasing flexibility & efficient user experience ensuring significant savings.

Q. Other than the cost efficiency, what are the reasons behind the adoption of Open Source by the government? Is the policy on adoption of Open Source favourable?

Other than the substantial cost advantage, the popularity of Open Source is mainly driven by greater demand for collaboration and the ability to integrate different devices with enterprise IT applications. The other important aspects are; agility, freedom to customize, rapid deployment, scalability, support and security.

As the days of vendor lock-in is indeed over, Open Source is a becoming a prominent choice to enhance their core infrastructure platforms with advanced communication tools & integration features and truly leverage the digital transformation trends that include: IoT, social, mobile, analytics and cloud.

Q. Customers are beckoning with digital and social channels to engage with the brands. How does Open Source-based CRM help improve customer engagement and efficiency?

Customer engagement and retention is the top priority among organizations, Open Source based CRM solution is getting even more widely accepted, helping organizations boost efficiency, reduce costs and propel their businesses forward. Open Source powered CRM has become an intelligent tool to drive customer engagement and operational tasks.

Customers are increasingly beckoning with digital and social channels to engage with the brands. To ensure customer loyalty and retention, CRM has emerged as an essential tool, especially in verticals like hospitality, telecom, BFSI, Education, Hospitals and Retail. With on-premise CRM application suite, enterprises can enhance their capabilities and engage more effectively with their customer-base intensifying focus on productivity; by leveraging its powerful workflows & actionable insights and take agile decisions for business acceleration.

The Open Source-based CRM solutions available today manages the complete customer relationship process and combines all key customer management applications that include; Lead Management, Contact Management, Account Management, Ticket Management, Role Management and Activity Management. By bundling disparate categories into an all-embracing solution and replacing the proprietary license-model with Open Source, it is indeed a powerful and comprehensive tool.