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My Experience on Building a New Generation CRM Company and Ecosystem with Kreato

We started Navrita with a vision of making customer life-cycle management an easily accessible and adaptable process to every SME (Small & Medium Enterprises). To realize this vision, we started building Kreato CRM – a moderately priced, end-to-end Customer Relationship Management solution characterized by leading-edge technology, comprehensive functionality and a highly flexible architecture.

Building Kreato CRM

When we started with developing Kreato in mid of 2012, we finalized that it has to be built over four main pillars.

First being it has to be a complete and an integrated CRM solution – covering all three main facets of CRM: Marketing, Sales & Customer Support and pre-integrated with required 3rd party applications. We don’t want our customers to juggle through multiple tools to manage their customer relations. Kreato will serve as primary and integrated platform to manage the complete customer life-cycle.

Second it has to be naturally flexible – Hence we first built a CRM framework with qualities to restructure its schema as needed and also ingredients to include new modules and workflows as required. And then housed Kreato on top of that framework, so that our customers can embrace the exact customization that they need.

Third on the pricing point. It has to be very attractive, affordable and modular – To make it possible we framed a moderately priced one single subscription package with all the must-have CRM features loaded and adopted the affordable & incremental pay-per-user subscription model. And then all other add-on features and much needed integrations are provided through the pick-n-pay App subscription model. So that our customers can just pay for only the Apps they want in addition to the must-have CRM features that comes as default with user subscription.

And the final one being the security. We wanted to provide the absolute security – Having hosted our solution at Azure, we know for sure that we don’t have to think even once about the infrastructure security. And we don’t have to worry on the access level security as we have the 256 bit SSL -encrypted application and database access in place. And on the data security, we felt that absolute data segregation only will provide the heightened data security. So instead of following the shared database model where all customers’ data co-exist in a single database, we decided to follow the multi-instance database architecture model, providing every customer a dedicated database.

After nearly two years of time has been devoted to build Kreato Cloud CRM with focused research and engineering on base of the four pillars (explained above) which includes 6 months of stealth mode for Cloud Infrastructure testing, we launched Kreato for general availability on April 2014.

Building the CRM Ecosystem

During the journey of Kreato building process, we decided that in-addition to covering the sales, marketing and customer service facets of CRM, more innovative features and supportive functions have to be introduced in-order to enrich our customer’s usage of Kreato in their customer life-cycle management or on improving their customer experience. And we know that we alone cannot drive such innovations and the best solution is building the CRM ecosystem comprised of best-of-breed technology platforms, supportive service partners and professionals that suits the CRM space.

To provide suitable examples – on the technology platform part, integrating cloud telephony will benefit Kreato customers with ability to track telephony communications from their CRM itself; on the service provider part, with the availability of trusted web designing provider, our customers can instantly create or enrich their web presence to make complete use of Kreato marketing tools; on the professionals part, our customers can instantly hire service of a sales professional well trained on Kreato lead and sales management features on a temporary or permanent basis to support their sales activities.

Including 3rd Party Technology platforms in the Ecosystem: We started addressing the first part of the CRM ecosystem – integrating more and more technology platforms like cloud telephony, text messaging service, web, social and email marketing solutions, web chat software and lead generating platforms with Kreato. Only one thumb rule that we followed on all these integrations is, we did the integration works up front and made all these integrations to be “Plug-n-Play” with Kreato. Our customers can enjoy the benefits of this ecosystem from the day one rather than spending more time, money and efforts to find external consultancy to make the integrations workable. So when an organization chooses Kreato, they are actually choosing an accessible and ready-to-use CRM ecosystem from the day one.

Our Kreato App Store is already live with inclusion of much-needed technology platforms. Mostly all the customers Kreato has got till-date make use of at-least one of these integrations, a welcome note which reinforces our dedication to enrich this ecosystem further.

Also we believed publishing the API platform can further fuel these innovations. Hence we opened up the API platform so that Kreato and any other third party applications used by our customers can talk to each other to build a custom solution that needed.

Including Service Partners in the Ecosystem: As we have progressed on the integration of technology platforms part and confident that we can add more and more required technology integrations, we started working on the next part of the ecosystem: Service partners. And now we are excited to announce the launch of service partner program, where we wanted to align with like-minded service partners who can help our customers on execution of various support systems of CRM like digital presence, social media management etc. It becomes easier for our customers to choose and use the service of these trusted providers who are already partners of this ecosystem.

Including CRM certified Professionals in the Ecosystem: We felt that adding the human-touch to the ecosystem will make it complete in real sense. We wanted to provide a platform as part of this ecosystem which will create a talented pool of professionals (sales, marketing, administrators and consultants) who are trained and certified in Kreato CRM ecosystem. Our customers can easily hire and use the service of these certified professionals to support their business operations. We will be co-launching this platform along with the service partner program.

We firmly believe that building an innovative cloud based CRM product supported by the ecosystem of compatible technology platforms, service providers and certified CRM professionals will strategically address and help us to realize our greater vision of making customer life-cycle management an easily accessible and adaptable process to every SME.

Even though it’s a beginning, we feel we are moving in the right direction to build the much needed CRM ecosystem that really matters to our customers. We are proud that even we are taking part in building India as a Product Nation.

Guest Post by Lokanathan Kutuva, Founder & CEO, Navrita Software Pvt. Ltd.

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SaaS Based CRM & Lead Management Software from India

Main reason behind choosing a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) & lead management software is to cut down the sales time and add to the quality of client service. With a well equipped CRM & lead management system, customer relations would improve and the process of customer tracking is going to get efficient. Due to this, one would notice that the number of delays would be less and sales visibility would improve manifold. With all the sectors in India such as health care, financial, retail and pharmaceutical considering CRM and lead management systems, it gets imperative to know about the various available options.

  1. CRMNEXT: CRMNEXT is a responsive software designed to satisfy numerous goals like enhancing customer contentment and loyalty, affording your sales, management, marketing and service providing teams with thorough easily accessible information, manage, track and focus performance indicators like profitability, customer share, market-share, revenues and cross-market reports. This software is used in finance, banking, insurance, mutual fund, telecom, pharma, retail and multimedia sectors.
  2. Dquip: This lead management software would be of great help in lead acquisition, routing, prospecting and closure. The features that make it a wonderful pick are ability to add leads online, lead delegation, lead tracking, reminders via SMS and email and detailed reporting. Dquip lead management software consists of cloud as well as clients online servers.
  3. ImpelCRM: This software not only covers lead management but goes beyond touch marketing too. This is a Cloud + Mobile CRM that promise to help in many areas such as lead generation, order processing, collections, inventory management, and customer support. Striking features of this software include field reporting, e-coupon management, inventory management, email integration and advanced reporting. This is available in both mobile and web versions.
  4. Kreato CRM– Kreato CRM is a comprehensive cloud software solution that manages multiple aspects like managing numerous leads and inquiries, marketing campaigns like SMS and Emails, SFA(Sales Force Automation) – account conversion, generating analytical reports, arranging, planning and tracking customer support tasks and communicating with customers via inbound and outbound calls. The other notable features are business apps and integration apps.
  5. Lead Prime: This simple to configure and highly integrated software comes in a ready to use mode. It is going to make it possible to track down the leads, would provide timely alerts and help bring improvement in the lead conversion ratio.  Some interesting features that set it apart from others are, ease of use, fully automated processing, customizable, and easy to integrate. Lead Prime is available in both web and mobile versions.
  6. Leadsquared: This comprehensive lead management software would help one in areas such as lead acquisition, verification, routing and sales closure. Some of the features that add to the worth of this software are website visit tracking, lead scoring, email tracking, activity history, advanced search, dynamic and static lists, reminders, task updates, and social profile support. Available via SAAS model, this software surely promises to bring in efficacy in the order tracking and routing processes.
  7. Sales babu– Sales babu is integrated CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software that is hosted on cloud. Being on cloud offers the advantage that it can be operated from anywhere in the world. The data can be accessed, stored and analyzed irrespective of your location. The perks of using this software is that you can monitor the employee’s sales leads, check whether they are achieving the targets and likewise analyze and predict sales, implementation of strategies and carry out the successive planning. You can also sort qualifying leads, acquire a large amount of customer related information, collect the inquiries and manage various contact details of customers.
  8. SalesWah – Saleswah is specially designed for small and medium scale businesses and comes at affordable rates. The main highlights of this software are that it is user-friendly, innate app that has excellent functionality. Striking features of Saleswah include: easily operable by all and doesn’t need technical help, digs into customer interaction history and tells you where to focus, lets you customize your logo, email, time an currency settings and integrates data across Google apps and Microsoft Outlook.
  9. Winds CRM – Cloud based Winds CRM is mainly designed to grow organizations and is useful to both the sales and management teams. It performs a plethora of activities like managing multiple solutions like lead, clients, contacts, tsk management, team organization and product analysis, information and reporting. In the sales department it performs these functions: it helps tract leads that are created, qualified and promoted via numerous pipelines, sales staff can enter relevant information, update and track relevant opportunities thus making the entire process transparent, generating invoices against sales order and automation of the invoice generation proposal within seconds. In the marketing sector, Winds CRM is used for search based marketing for cross selling among customers and manage and orchestrate different campaigns to increase the output efficiency.
  10. Zoho CRM– A complete eagle-eye view about your entire sales cycle is provided by Zoho CRM. The key areas in which it makes your managing simpler is by automating the data so that you can lay emphases on selling, tracks your sales activity by displaying the sales cycle thereby helping you align your goals and strategies and it is mobile responsive. Add-ons include: connecting with your customers from within your CRM account, synchronizing your CRM account with other applications to increase the scalability of your business solution and you can integrate Gmail with CRM.

Any of these CRM and lead management systems can be considered after evaluating order processing, customer relation and order tracking needs. Depending on the business process, any of these variants can be put to work.

For any more queries or confusion about the SAAS based software, feel free to contact us.