Norwest-backed CRMnext eyes expansion in the US, Europe & Australia

Delhi-based Acidaes Solutions Pvt Ltd, which runs customer relationship management offering CRMnext, is eyeing expansion in the US, Europe and Australia this year, a top executive of the company told Techcircle.in. Currently, CRMnext operates in Asia-Pacific, Africa and the Middle East.

With this, the company aims to become one of the top five players in the global CRM space. The global CRM market is estimated to be $18 billion, while the Indian market is estimated to be about $1.85 billion, with a CAGR projection of 21 per cent.

Earlier this month, the company had raised Rs 42 crore ($7 million) from Norwest Venture Partners (NVP).

"India for us is very important as it is one of the fastest growing CRM markets in the world, outpacing the developed markets. Large customer facing companies with close to 30,000 employees are focusing on how to differentiate and deliver their brand promise seamlessly across verticals," said Nishant Singh, CEO, CRMnext.

"This has led them to think about how to centralise data, make the right customer intelligence available and put in place processes that enable them to deliver a holistic brand experience," he said.

Spearheading innovation

The company's services include managing sales, marketing and customer service across the organisation and sharing information by centralising all customer data and processes. This calendar year, it will also focus on research & development and releasing more solutions in the CRM space.

Back in 2002, when Singh founded CRMnext, enterprise CRM implementation failure rates had been as high as 50 per cent due to lack of execution and inability to upgrade. He realised that platform capability limitations—not features—led to CRM failures.

"Large-scale enterprises were not being served well enough; innovations in the CRM space were not visible, and there was a lack of products that understood their needs. So we came in with strategies that are no longer a theory, but hardcore mandates that we have worked on and executed," Singh said.

Among its offerings, the company has developed 'Autobot Upgrade', which automatically retrofits customisation and upgrades without breaking integrations, reducing the cost associated with high migration projects. Another application, 'Autonoma Integration' is a pattern-based integration capability to help deliver complex integrations. The 'Shape Shifting Architecture' provides capability to deliver codeless customisation by allowing clients to configure cross-departmental processes, escalations, alerts, multiple data entry layouts and more on the fly.

The company offers multiple modules, including sales, service, marketing, online sales manager, social, analytics and a self-service platform.

Competition

The company boasts of clients like ICICI Bank, AXIS Bank, Max Life Insurance, TATA AIA and HDFC Bank. Customers from verticals like media, pharmaceutical, telecom, entertainment, energy and manufacturing include Pfizer, Reliance, CRISIL, Fullerton Financials, Bajaj and IIFL.

A profitable venture—as claimed by the company—CRMnext currently has 300 employees and plans to double this number in 12 months.

CRMnext competes with Salesforce.com, Oracle Siebel, and Microsoft dynamics, etc. "CRMnext helps define business strategies by making sense of Big Data coming from various customer touch points. Traditional CRM systems do not engage customers or make use of analytics," said Mohan Kumar, executive director, NVP India.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)