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

So, Let us see the definition of CRM in Wikipedia: “It is a system for managing a company’s interactions with current and future customers. It often involves using technology to organize, automate and synchronize sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support.”

There are also big companies in the world that provide CRM solutions like SugarCRM, Salesforce, Microsoft and SAP Business ByDesign.

But what about Iran? Many companies have bought a pirated or a development version of such international CRM platforms and they buy them without any support, official training and know how to deploy the solution correctly.

SarvCRM is an Iranian cloud-based CRM system based on SugarCRM that wants to bring international experience to Iran and it wants to change the local understanding of CRM.  Over two years of development, enhancing SugarCRM base with modules meeting local needs and changing the architecture to deliver a SaaS (Software as a Service) model, is what sets SarvCRM apart from other players in Iran.  Because of its SaaS delivery model, SarvCRM gets deployed with the objective of increasing user adoption rate.  Above all, the team behind SarvCRM works with the client to not only introduce technology improvements, but also improvements across process, policy and employee culture so that the business is enabled to deliver a differentiated customer experience.

Farhad Bazadeh, the founder of SarvCRM, who was a CRM Senior Manager at Accenture, brought his experiences of working with enterprise customers of Accenture like Bank of America, AT&T, Microsoft and Cisco to SarvCRM.  He claims that there are many companies in Iran that are selling just the software and are not experienced in helping clients to address their CRM challenges.

Farhad Bazadeh(left), Hessam Shafie(right) and and Reza Gozashti (not pictured), founding team of SarvCRM, 7th Iran Startups Meetup, August 19, 2014.Photo by Hoora Vakili.

Bazadeh believes that there are three kinds of competitors in Iran:

1. Microsoft Excel.
2. Companies that provide CRM just for the sake of having a CRM application next to their hardware services and are not focus on the solution.
3. Pirated or development version of CRM softwares.

There are few challenges they are dealing with.  One is the culture of management team and their staffs. Secondly, they have to deal with companies which sell the software for a cheap price, because they see CRM application as a commodity.  People sometimes think that the cheapest price is a better choice but they do not think that a wrong choice may destroy their business.  May you wonder that they do not sell their product to any customer.  They are selective on who they take as a customer. Customers need to have a culture that can deliver on CRM objectives and be tech savvy.  Sometimes they help the client to understand instead of buying a CRM application, it is best to fix other areas in their business.  All customers receive a 14 day trial period so that they can experience the solution before they commit to the monthly payment process.

SarvCRM, hosted on Afranet’s data center, is a major product of Sarveno which is the CRM solution provider side of the business

SarvCRM is now being used by 21 companies in Iran.  They hope that as internet speed improves in Iran, more businesses will be willing to rely on cloud based applications to meet their business objectives. More localized modules are in the works over the coming months. Lastly, they are also open to investors

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