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Q&A with Avidian Technologies on CRM Trends

By Brendan B. Read
Senior Contributing Editor

Avidian Technologies say its goal is to build the “easiest CRM software in Outlook”: a vision that has attracted business from over 15,000-plus customers and growing worldwide. That has led the privately-held firm to be, it reports, profitable and financially stable with record revenues in 2010 even in the face of the economic slowdown.

TMCnet recently interviewed James Wong, CEO, Avidian Technologies on CRM trends and what is new with the firm’s offerings:TMCnet:          What key trends are you seeing in CRM demand and applications and what are the drivers?

JW:      The economy is absolutely affecting how companies are treating their customers. In fact, I would suggest that it is the single biggest factor dictating the direction of most companies' customer strategies. Coverage of the recession in the media has diminished, but for our clients - who are primarily SMBs [small-midsized businesses] - we're finding that they don't feel as though they are out of the slump just yet.Our clients are telling us that customer spending is still down. And for them, this means more heated competition for each and every dollar spent. As a result, our clients are doing everything they can to make every customer contact more meaningful and more profitable. At the same time, however, they themselves have less money to allocate on large CRM initiatives to make this a reality. So, we're seeing our clients turn to the cloud. They're looking for CRM solutions that they can jump right into without long implementation periods and high upfront costs, and hosted solutions are often the perfect fit.

TMCnet:          Businesses and consumers are going mobile, and social. Is it now possible to untether the smartphones? How has going from 1-to-1 to 1-to-many (i.e. social CRM) affected CRM strategies? There is no doubt about it, mobility is huge right now. I think any CRM vendor that does not recognize mobile CRM as a key component of their overall product line is really behind the times. That said I believe a mobile CRM solution still needs to maintain a connection to a larger cloud-, desktop- or server-based version of the CRM solution.

I don't think we've reached a point yet where we can completely untether smartphone CRM from the home-base - I don't know of any professionals who work solely from a smartphone yet. The fact of the matter is that people still return to the office or laptop, and the customer data there needs to be in synch with the data on their mobile device.In terms of social CRM, businesses cannot afford to ignore social media as a method of connecting with customers and potential customers. Customers have become accustomed to using social media throughout their day for everything from entertainment to communication, and they expect to be able to connect with the companies they do business with in the same way. I think a lot of companies already recognize this and are adjusting their customer strategies to account for the role of social media. What we're seeing is that our clients are using social media not to replace the traditional sales process, but rather to augment it. They're primarily using it as a means to have a secondary engagement channel with customers, with the traditional channels remaining intact.

TMCnet:          CRM installations have been characterized as slow and expensive; sometimes the lead times have been so long the problems they were purchased to solve have disappeared. Are you seeing companies shorten the go-live and payback/ROI times and if so by how much today as compared to a year or 18 months ago? What CRM methods i.e. modular, hosted are buyers seeking in response? Discuss the advantages and challenges of these alternatives.

JW:      We’re definitely seeing companies looking to shorten their implementation and ROI cycles. As I mentioned earlier, with the slow economy lingering, our clients are expressing the need to get up and running faster than ever. For some, the cold hard truth is that if they don't implement something to help them better manage their customer relationships that will work for them now, they might not even be around to use a CRM solution later.I can only speak to what we're seeing with our solutions and our clients, but we've been able help many of our clients reduce what could have been a months-long implementation timeframe down to a matter of mere days or at most, a week or two. The big key here is the cloud. Since the hardware and other backend infrastructure are not necessary when utilizing a hosted CRM solution, companies can get started actually using the solution much, much faster. Using a cloud-based CRM isn't without its potential pitfalls, though. Companies need to be sure to select a good, reliable vendor. After all, if the vendor's infrastructure breaks down, so does theirs. It's also important to remember that cloud-based solutions rely on the Internet. This is less of an issue today than it was in the past, but if a company struggles to maintain a reliable Internet connection, trying to use a cloud-based could get very frustrating.

TMCnet:          What solutions have you come out with and will you be coming out with in response to these trends? What has been the feedback from your customers?

JW:      We offer a mobile version of our flagship CRM suite, Prophet, call Prophet Mobile. We currently support Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Palm, but the iPhone and Android (News - Alert) devices are in the works. In terms of customer response, what we're seeing regarding mobile is that companies want a CRM solution that has a mobile component. In some cases this is a deal breaker and we're gaining some customers simply because we do offer a mobile version of our product. Truth be told, these customers don't always know why they want mobile CRM or how they will use it just yet, but they know they want it. My estimation is that approximately 30 percent of our customers are requesting mobile CRM, but probably only 10 percent are actually taking advantage of it at this time.We also offer a subscription-based, hosted version of Prophet 5 called Prophet OnDemand. This solution features all of the Microsoft (News - Alert) Outlook-based CRM features Prophet is famous for, but none of the data or backend infrastructure is required on the part of the client - we host all of that in our secure datacenter for them. Customer response to our cloud solution has been excellent. In fact, the majority of our revenue - over 65 percent - is now based on subscription-based sales and these sales have increased over 100 percent in a year's time. We've also found that our customer base is happier and more loyal. As evidence of this, our monthly subscription renewal rate is a staggering 97 percent.

We will be releasing later this month the Prophet 5 Ultimate Edition. It enables businesses to tailor Prophet's existing opportunity tracking capabilities to meet the needs of departments beyond the sales force. Groups such as the customer service team, technical support, fulfillment and client services can now benefit by customizing Prophet's opportunity tracking features to best suit their specific needs.In other editions of Prophet, customer records are limited to the concept of sales opportunities, as this is the core element of a sales-centric CRM. Prophet Ultimate, however, allows each individual department to create their own customer record template for a variety of purposes. For example, these records can still be designated as sales opportunities for the sales force, but alternative templates can also be created such as service tickets for the technical support staff or shipping orders for the fulfillment team.Each template can be further customized with over 100 user-defined fields. These fields can be any combination of drop down menus or text and date fields. In addition, Prophet Ultimate allows users to create mail merges within Outlook and to segment which customers get emails based on any number of classifications determined through advanced filtering technology.Prophet Ultimate also allows for all these organization-wide departments to be supported from a single Prophet server. This means all customer records created - be they sales opportunities, service tickets, shipping orders or any other template - are in the same database. If given the appropriate permissions, members of any team can easily view customer records created by other teams as necessary. This ensures proper coordination between the members of various company-wide teams.