While in Tehran, have you used Snapp to order your taxi through your mobile application or Zoodfood to order your food online? Has technology made substantial changes in your industry? Are you about to become old news as some new competitors steals all of your loyal customers?
Digital disruption is taking shape in Iran and for good reason. We are watching business model after business model being disrupted by major changes in mobile technology, new marketplaces are being created which is transforming how buyers and sellers interact with each other. Technology being provided by local providers such as Parsonline and Irancell, have accelerated business digital transformation in all major industries.
But through all of these changes, one thing has remained the same: Customers are king. Today’s customer expects answers instantly and they want immediate gratification. A company might be having an excellent product or service, but if they don’t provide a memorable customer experience, they will lose. Thus, if you want to deliver an efficient and effective digital transformation strategy for your business, it must be based on transforming your customer’s experience, in such a way that it becomes differentiating.

That is where a new CRM thinking comes in. With a well thought out investment in CRM process and technology, you can delight your customers by putting all the answers they want, right at their fingertips. Regardless of channel of interaction, from classic retail to modern mobile marketplaces (like Snapp), CRM technology puts personalized and immediate answers in front of your customers. This sounds a bit complicated. Well, it is.
Pause for a moment, and think about the CRM evolution that has happened over the last 3 decades. In US, thirty years ago, a CRM application meant a call center application which allowed call center staff to track their trouble tickets. In early 90’s, CRM technology enabled sales management through sales force automation applications. In late 90’s, with the adoption of emails, marketing automation tools became the driver of CRM investments. But what truly transformed the CRM industry was when companies stopped looking to CRM application just as a way to introduce efficiencies inside their organization. Instead, when companies started looking to CRM application to manage the interactions between companies and their customers, that is when CRM shifted from a cost reduction investment to a revenue generation investment, composed of transformation across culture, processes and enabling technologies.
Still, most of the times, companies are stuck in their old way of doing things, using their legacy CRM technology to support separate business functions. What is more, they have not introduced any CRM culture shift and process improvements in their organization. By looking forward, by correctly using CRM capabilities to enable people, process and technology requirements, businesses will be able to provide a customer-first digital strategy. This CRM transformation ultimately needs to deliver on the following mandates:

• Build customer loyalty through a customer service capability that consistently delivers an efficient and effective solution for customers
• Increase revenue through cross-sell & up-sell capabilities
• Design a differentiated to-be customer experience, and align people, process and technology capabilities to deliver on customer needs
• Capture customer data across all interaction channels, and generate actionable insights to help with segment based treatment delivery
• Leverage technology to migrate customers to self-service channels which will help to reduce cost across marketing, sales and after-sales services

Where do you start?

• Customer needs driven initiatives: Understand customer needs, drivers of satisfactions and dissatisfactions. Leverage that information and identify key customer pain points. Define initiatives that address those pain points.  If you are able to deliver on those needs and remedy the pain points, you will ultimately succeed.
• Enabling employees: Empower employees.  Your CRM infrastructure and supporting processes must be designed with the employee and the customer in mind.  The right CRM application helps sales team to sell effectively and helps customer support agents deliver a delightful customer experience by providing appropriate information to the right customer at their preferred channel of interaction at the right time.
• Effortless Interactions: Understand the customer journey and choreograph customer interactions accordingly.  Make it easy for customers to work with you.  This needs a well-orchestrated service delivery across each human and digital touch points.
• Personalized Information Delivery: Transform your business in such a way that it operates based on single view of customer information.  Today’s customer has more access to information than before, thanks to advances in smart phones, social media and digital enablement through Iranian providers.  Your CRM platform needs to capture all customer information across all of those channels and enables the business to operate based on insight driven interactions.

What we learned:

Sarveno has helped leading service providers in Iran through successful CRM transformations.  Here are some practical tips we have learned through those experiences:

• Start small: Thing big, start small.  Make the initial scope small so that it becomes achievable.  Leverage pilot approach to show that team is able to deliver on transformation objectives.
• Deploy dedicated transformation team: Having the marketing, sales and contact center be responsible to deliver on transformation projects will be difficult.  Often times, they are pressured to deliver on near term objectives, which will result in delayed deliver on transformation projects.  It is more beneficial to create a dedicated transformation team to deliver on transformation projects.
• Measure the value: Make sure that you have implemented ways that shows how much value you are generating across the organization.
• Manage risk: Plan for the worst case scenario, hope for the best, which means that you have to manage risk in every single step.
• Implement Best Practices: Don’t reinvent the wheel.  Understand the leading practices and customize it for your current situation at hand.

With a successful CRM transformation, your organization will be able to capture and understand customer needs.  With those insights, you will be able to implement targeted treatments for each segment and deliver a differentiated customer experience which will be sustainable.  This is how great companies like Apple and Starbucks have been able to separate themselves from their competitors and deliver benefits for both shareholders and customers.

About Sarveno

Founded in 2012, Sarveno Business Solutions has grown into Iran’s premier CRM management consulting companies focused on delivering game changing CRM solutions to organizations in Iran.

We believe the path to becoming customer centric and delivering on your customer needs is much more than installing a CRM application. It involves formulating an appropriate CRM strategy and changing the internal culture. Combining proven methodologies, previous successful international experiences, and access to subject matter experts across leading international CRM solution providers, Sarveno enables clients to address their CRM challenges through implementing sustainable and differentiating solutions.

Furthermore, Sarveno is the first company in Iran who is providing a cloud based CRM solution, called SarvCRM, which is hosted in one of the premier data centers inside Iran.

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SarvCRM will revolutionize the concept of CRM in Iran

Prior to Periscope, Kayvon founded his first startup, which he sold to learning business Blackboard for $4 million before he even turned to 21. Kayvon is 27 years old and was born in San Francisco. His parent immigrated from Iran to US before 1979 revolution. He has a B.S in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Since Live-Video streaming is shaking the tech world, this become for Periscope the momentum to sell the startup to Twitter. Twitter paid in March 2015 in a quiet deal slightly less than $100 million*, which made Periscope one of Twitter’s more expensive purchases. This seems a good deal for both sides. For Periscope which was founded in 2014 and had only 5 team members (today 25 employees) without even launching the product after 11 months of works and also for Twitter as real-time communications platform, who wants to become the major player in the Live-Video industry.

There are also big challenges Periscope (Twitter) business model faces toward content providers such as HBO**. HBO and other content providers companies are concern about piracy on the new services like Periscope. In April this year HBO’s “Game of Thrones” premiere, were illegally broadcast through the Periscope app. This incident led HBO to send takedown notices to Periscope/Twitter (in the United States the law requires that unauthorized copyrighted material online be taken down within 24 hours). In order to fix the piracy issue, Periscope needs to work on a better technology for automating removal of copyright content, but technical complexity for fixing of this issue is more complicated than it is on YouTube or similar platforms.

Other major player on the Video-Live Streaming field is Meerkat, which was launched in March and turned Live-Streaming into a Twitter’s platform. But Twitter now offers Periscope as a new service. Interestingly Periscope isn’t built into Twitter, it’s a standalone app with Twitter integration. Now the question is if Periscope will win over Meerkat and other competitors like YouNow.
Periscope has changed the game for the Video-Live streaming and is going to shake up the media. That is the reason why Twitter did not wait for the launch of the first release of Periscope.

* Industry sources tell the deal was somewhere between $75 and $120 million USD
**HBO is an American premium cable and satellite television network

For more information and complete list of startups and etc you can check this out.

Eshti is not just a market place. Eshti (which means spindle in Yazd) is a platform that frees you up to make your handicrafts and it will take care of selling, promoting and packaging them for you. With the help of Eshti, artists can focus on making handmade products. Artists can then trust their products to Eshti who will manage individual stores on its website by posting photos of products and when orders come in, packaging and selling them, all without increasing the price that the customer will have to pay.

As Meysam Dehghani, the founder of Eshti told us, Eshti is not a marketplace that is open to any artist. Eshti selects artists based on their works and signs contracts with them. Artists can register for free and consign their handicrafts and Eshti will get a small percentage from the sale of products. Eshti is focused on quality and trust with this strategy. Two days per week, they deliver products for free in Tehran. Artists are not just from Tehran but also there are many artists from Rasht and Mashhad.

In Iran, there are other online handicrafts stores but Eshti claims that they are different. They focus on promoting the artists instead of the products and what their next area of focus is to optimize their warehousing practices and the delivery of products.

Eshti is now at Dmond Accelerator. Right now, they keep the products in their dedicated section in Dmond Accelerator and they are going to launch their own warehouse in three months.

“Digital healthcare (also known as digital health) is an upcoming discipline that involves the use of information and communication technologies to help address the health problems and challenges faced by patients. These technologies include both hardware and software solutions and services.”

There are many digital healthcare services around the globe, services such as ZocDoc, and now we can add Shafajoo to the list.

Shafajoo (meaning In Search of Healing in Persian) is an Iranian digital healthcare service that helps you find a nearby doctor and instantly book an appointment. They have many other services including podcasts and discussion forums. The target users are not just about the patients: it also includes physicians.  Doctors, for instance, will have a user profile including their biographies and resumes. I think the most interesting part of this product is that you are able to ask doctors questions, questions that they will answer, thus preventing unnecessary visits to their offices. While there are few agile teams in Iran, this team uses the power of agile methodology in software development. They are also writing many articles related to healthcare.

Shafajoo has now almost 100,000 visits per month and 4000 active users.

Shafajoo has been launched at MAPS(An Iranian Accelerator) and It is a product of SatraTech company.

They are dealing with some challenges though. An important one is that the doctors are not interested in technologies in general especially digital healthcare. They prefer to use traditional methods. Some of doctors do not like reviews or they do not want other people to know how many patients they have. Shafajoo has designed the review section but It is disabled on their website. They hope that, in time, they can create a culture where reviews are not only acceptable but also desirable; then they can activate the review section.

SatraTech Team, Shafajoo is a product of SatraTech company.

In addition, they are not alone in the Iranian market.They have almost 10 potential competitors.

Shafajoo has now almost 100,000 visits per month and 4000 active users. They are working on regional markets especially the Middle East, and plan to have English and Arabic versions of Shafajoo. They are working on focusing their the target market on patients and providing healthcare services to organizations as well as rebranding their product to ‘The Road of Health’, a preventive initiative put forward and highly promoted by the Iranian government.

Having spent a good part of this past year in Iran and some of it working at MAPS, a relatively young but highly promising and inspiring startup incubator, what surprises me is not so much that this is finally happening, but rather that it took so long for it to happen. Just consider some of these statistics. Iran has one of the youngest and most educated populations anywhere in the Middle East. More than 70% of Iranians are younger than 35, and Iran’s literacy rate stands at 85% (OECD/WorldBank), a number that increases to 97% among young adults (aged between 15 and 24), without any gender discrepancy and well ahead of the regional average of 62%. Iran’s rigorous education system and college entrance exams filter the best and brightest for its leading institutions of higher learning, where only 10% make it to the highly selective public universities. Maryam Mirzakhani was the product of this system, and her Alma Mater, Sharif University, continues to inch upwards in the rankings among the world’s very best.

Another secret that is gradually bubbling to the surface is that women are at the forefront of this technological breakthrough. Maryam Mirzakhani is truly exceptional however you look at what she has accomplished, but her story makes one wonder how many more like her are still inside the country. 60% percent of college graduates in Iran are women, many of them trailblazers in their own right. Satratech, a MAPS startup, is a predominantly female-run operation having 8 of its 12 engineers as well as its co-founder all women. Shafajoo, its health and medical application, received top honors at the 6th annual Iranian web show in 2014, AND the software gained its 100,000th user within 6 months of its launch. Just this past month, Iran held its first startup weekend for women, one of a handful of countries to ever do so.

There are of course many challenges facing the high-tech community in Iran, challenges such as the US-imposed sanctions, the internal censors, and the continuing brain drain. But these have been a part of life in the country for a long time now, and the Iranians have managed to make their headways despite these problems. In many ways, these challenges have made them more resilient, more resourceful, more creative. Despite the sanctions for instance, you can find any high-tech consumer item you wish in Iran as a visit to Payetakht will attest to. The internal censors have made it inconvenient, and at times difficult to access many sites or to connect to the outside world, but by one account up to 70% or Iranians bypass government filters, a realization that may finally be encouraging the government to ease up the restrictions. And even though the brain drain must be felt on many levels in Iran, it hasn’t stopped the country from embracing internet banking, mobile bill-pay, and the spread and wide use of technology in a host of areas. In fact Iran has one of highest numbers of internet users in the world, ranking 13 when those numbers are taken as a percentage of population, well above, China, Russia, India, Brazil and Turkey.

Outside the country Iranians have cemented their reputation as pioneers in science and technology and by the looks of it, they are doing the same inside. Yes, the road inside has been more challenging with many more ups and downs, but Iranians seem to be overcoming them one by one. Iran is coming online as a high-tech powerhouse. The big question is, how far will it go, and how fast.

The Bridge 2014 conference (September 6, 2014 at the UC Berkeley Wheeler Auditorium) is predicated on the notion that the promotion of entrepreneurship, and innovation is the indispensable key to sustainable growth. This gathering will be part of a global effort to draw attention to “High Tech Entrepreneurship in Iran: Opportunities and Challenges.” This tagline represents the Bridge 2014 vision of calling upon change makers and thought leaders both in Silicon Valley and Iran. According to Kamran Elahian, Chairman and Co-Founder of Global Catalyst Partners, “We believe Silicon Valley and Iran’s thought leaders can empower aspiring young entrepreneurs that are striving to make a difference in this world.” “We envision this conference to be a precursor to future international events where highly accomplished executives will coach/mentor their aspiring counterparts from Iran.”

Conference participants will educate each other about the issues impacting high tech entrepreneurship in Iran, the prevailing conditions in the country that deviate from the “global innovation model” and the steps that should be taken to reduce this gap. Bridge 2014 complies with sanctions and corresponding laws. According to Kamran Elahian, “During this gathering, these key influencers with diverse backgrounds will share their vision, experiences, and perspectives for creating a better world through the power of innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit. This conference explores the role of high tech in economic development: where change is the catalyst and choice is unlimited.”

The issues that will be explored in this educational conference include: the attraction of venture capital, cultural attitudes towards entrepreneurs’ failure, existence of innovation clusters, the ease of starting businesses, and the availability and accessibility of mentors and role models. According to Dariush Zahedi, Director of the Berkeley Program on Entrepreneurship and Development in the Middle East, “We will examine the circumstances under which high tech entrepreneurship and innovation can emerge as engines of inclusive growth, reducing the country’s dependence on extractive industries, expanding the size of its middle class, reversing the flight of capital, and promoting the circulation of the brain-drain.”

Bridge 2014’s activities are hosted and sponsored by UC Berkeley. More than thirty companies, non-profit organizations and community leaders have provided support and donations for this event. For the list of sponsors, please see: www.bridge2014.org/donation.
About Bridge 2014
Bridge 2014 – “High Tech Entrepreneurship in Iran: Opportunities and Challenges” conference and additional activities, including subsequent conferences, research and publications are under the supervision/auspices of the UC Berkeley Program on Entrepreneurship and Development in the Middle East: bped.berkeley.edu.

I am a big fan of music and I believe without music, life would be a mistake as Nietzsche said.Because of that interest of me, Beeptunes is one of my favorite startups in Iran.

So, What is Beeptunes? Beeptunes has three main goals:1.Providing discographies of music tracks and albums. 2.Accessing the newest music tracks and albums in the fastest way. 3.Respect the copyright laws of music tracks and finally selling the music legally.There are many arguments about international copyright law.Downloading is one of most serious problem in not just Iran, but many other countries.In Iran, we do not have strong and clear copyright law about musical and entertainment works especially foreign version.We are making people aware of buying legal products and tell them not to copy or download it in our media and advertisements.Maybe It is the duty of people to respect the rights of artists.

Amirreza Vohoushi (left) is the Founder of Beeptunes and also CEO of Rahnama Company.5th Iran Startups Meetups.June 17,2014.Photo By Hoora Vakili.

Now, beeptunes mainly wants to respect the rights of musician.It is not just Beeptunes works, but there are some nice collaborations between musicians and the company.They make a contract with musicians and sells their tracks and albums.It is a win-win situation.I can say in two words that it is a legal-downloading website.In addition, It has a feature of free downloading that owner of track(s) allow(s) them to sell for free.They have also an android app for smart devices geeks.

One main problem that I see people have in Beeptunes is the speed of its cloud server that reduce the rate of downloading.

Today, Beeptunes has more than 44000 music tracks which part of them are available for free.Based on an article that has been published on Donyaye Eghtesad Newspaper, they have sold more than 85000 single tracks from that time they launched.

Consequently, the way is long and competitors are around.They know this very well.Huh?