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

Surprise Gadget is a website which provides this opportunity for Iranians who live abroad to surprise their family and friends in Iran by creative and exciting offers. For instance, You can invite them to a fancy restaurant in which we host your guests in VIP even better than what you imagine. You can also send a memorable picture printed on Persian carpet or a cake. Additionally you can send flowers and many other interesting gifts.

Surprised by SurpriseGadget

Surprised by SurpriseGadget

Surprised by SurpriseGadget

Everything is simple through the surprise gadget website and you can register your order just by some clicks and finally pay for it by your credit card. You can customize your gift by website tools to be felt personal. We care about all the details to make a remarkable moment for people you love.

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.

Rajamand said that their targeted ads are viewed 15,000,000 times in a day and his company is the first company in Iran that provides ‘Retargeting’ method of advertising.

However, these services are not free of charge. You can start your advertisement campaign with a minimum budget of 250,000 Rials (approximately $ 7).

Clickyab Team

Many companies and startups in Iran have already signed on, companies like Picuu, Ponisha and ZarinPal. It is claimed that one of these customers increased their sale by 30,000,000 rials just by placed targeted ads in Clickyab.

Rajamand said that their targeted ads are viewed 15,000,000 times in a day and his company is the first company in Iran that provides ‘Retargeting’ method of advertising.

If you liked this article, you can take a look at my previous articles:

Ponisha: The Heaven of Iranian Freelancers‏

Shafajoo Wants To Be Your Healing Angel

SarvCRM will revolutionize the concept of CRM in Iran

Ponisha Main Page

It is at this particular moment that Ponisha was born. Ponisha is the largest place for freelancers in Iran to get projects done and also to make money. Ponisha was launched in Dec, 2011 to help companies and individuals outsource their projects and hire people for short durations. It is also beneficial for entrepreneurs and startups to outsource technical parts of their projects. Here is  Nima Nourmohammady, the founder of Ponisha:  “Most people usually look for full-time jobs in a company, but I believe freelancing can be a full-time job, and with some training in marketing and negotiation, anyone with any skill could become successful. The benefits are endless. Just imagine there is no boss. In this situation, you can work whenever or wherever you want and on whatever project you desire and still make more money than people with regular employment.”

Currently Ponisha has more than 50.000 freelancers, with 2400 completed projects and a revenue of 5,103,158,949 Rials ($157,000) for freelancers. Nourmohammady said that the main goal of Ponisha  is to expand. “Our main and most important target is to reach 1 million registered members. We keep adding features, updates and promotions to keep our customers satisfied. Most Ponisha’s growth comes from our organic growth and we are thankful to our users who keep introducing us to their friends and networks.”

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Shafajoo Wants To Be Your Healing Angel

SarvCRM will revolutionize the concept of CRM in Iran

What Happened in Slush Tehran

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.

First of all, Divar has been developed on Android OS. After getting enough users, they developed the website and iOS application as well. The application is free and has more than 1 million active users on android. The application on iOS has been released lately and they’re working on it to make it better.

Two groups of people use Divar:

• Visitors who are searching for a service
• People who are going to provide a service

The second group is the main customers of Divar. Joining Divar and managing the advertisements is as easy as subscribing to a newsletter. After you submit your email address you will receive a link to your panel.

As Divar provides a service for all kinds of advertisement, there is two main branches. The advertise branch and the location branch.

With the location based filter you can see all the advertisements in a city. Cities shown on the first page, are being chosen by the population of advertisement in that city on Divar. If the numbers has passed the expected level, Divar will put the name of the city in the home page.

The other branch is about the advertisements categories. Except the employment category, all categories are free. Employer must pay for the job advertisement on Divar. If the employer did not delete the advertisement, every employment advertisement will stand on Divar 60 days.

There are specialized features in Divar. You can pay and use the urgent category in Divar. Every payment will put your advertisement in urgent category for 3 days.

So, Divar is an online Newspaper just presenting the requirement part.

This startup is the first of its genre in Iran. It has been launched six years ago and the first project was “Designing Logo for Pars Coders”.

Projects are classified as:

Time

• Short
• Long

Size

•  Small
•  Large

Complexity

• Simple
• Hard

The procedure is defined as:

• Order a project
• Select a freelancer
• Early Pay
• Delivery
• Payment

There are 11510 freelancer registered in Pars Coders. The average number of projects is 900 monthly and the total number of successful projects is 5374.

But here is the point: So, what were they doing those days of limitation? The answer: CafeBazaar is here.

CafeBazaar, founded by Hessam Armandehi, is a local app store for Iranian users who are using android devices.The aim was not just enabling people to download and use apps, also they can make money.The main probem of Iranian users besides restriction is that they cannot have an developer account and sell their apps officialy.It is because of the banking problem.However, there are many unofficial way that they use today for that.

CafeBazaar has also an android app that is more famous that its website.I can say that It is a combination of popular international applications and Iranian ones.You as an developer can apply your application and after a period of checking you can sell your local application and If your credit amount reach to 300,000 Toman(Approximately $100), they would take 30 percent of money and then they transfer rest of your revenue.In Addition, you can see the the reports of your app such as revenue chart and etc.

On July 2014, A report has been published by World Startup Report on The Economist that showed CafeBazaar is the third biggest internet company with $20M market valuation in Iran.

Some problems with that are that all of international apps do not publish as much fast as Google Play does.I said above you cannot find any apps on it but popular apps such as Facebook, Twitter and etc.Other problem is that the checking process lasts almost 5 working days.This process lasts just a couple of hours in Google Play Store.

Today, Google Play Store is open to downloading in Iran but the banking problem is still exist.

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?