Implications of Customer Relationship Management

Demonetization and GST implementation are Two critical economic disruptions has shaken up the economy and pushed us towards the digital economic reforms. Demonetization wiped out 86 % value of currency notes in circulation and pushed people towards the cashless facility and digital payments and more than 1 billion participated in this system voluntarily. This opened up new avenues for other systems and business to connect with people on a day to day level in a more personalised way. GST implementation moved the business from manual paperwork transaction of filing of tax return and paper submission to e-filing of tax returns and presentation of the necessary paperwork in digital form.

The much-needed boost to India’s digital infrastructure is here with citizens moving to the mobile payment system for day to day transactions and business moving to e-paper system where transactions are digitised, and database maintained.

Connecting with the business users in a personalised way is very much feasible and possible in the current scenario with the rapid adoption of mobile technology in every aspect of daily work from Communication, Payments, News to Entertainment. The days of use of CRM as a tool to generate business lead and converting to sales are over. CRM has much more pronounced usage in this digital age than before. Businesses need information on their fingertips to take the decision. One cannot wait to go back to the office or open up a laptop to get the information. That is too much cumbersome. Here mobile apps come into the picture. Every company fuses CRM technology and mobile technology to generate mobile app. The benefits of which are personalised content delivery.

Today's customers are much more difficult than in the past to please. They don't need business to sell them, instead what they need is the tool to keep them engaged. They want to voice out their opinion and in expect feedback in response to it. The fact can be stressed upon more as more and more companies look after the number of unique visitors to their mobile apps, their social media following through Facebook like, twitter followers and Instagram views. Customers don't buy products but the brand experience along with it.

The impact of mobile phones in business and the internet reach in India is directly impacting the business outlook. Some of the statistical data are presented below.

1.    Advance feature usage on mobile phones (email, internet and document editing) increased from 50 % to 54 % in the last three years.

2.    Mobile Internet users have grown from 245 million to 350 million in the previous three years and have reached 26.47 % of India’s population and are expected to reach 35% by 2022.

3.    There has been a growing number of website visitors from mobile phones and currently stands at 52.2 % of website traffic is driven through mobile web users.

4.    Android which is the leading mobile OS has 3.8 million apps on its web store and followed by Apple iOS which has 2 million apps on its app store.

5.    The sheer volume of mobile internet traffic among which mobile video traffic stands at 11.5 Million TB per month which in itself is facilitating and drives the companies around the globe to invest more and more on mobile optimised data content.

With mobile and digitisation entering into every sphere of our life, a thought comes into every business user mind how far this technology can go into shaping the future of their business. This is probably having endless possibilities. The music industry went from physical forms of storage like tapes to CDs moving to digital media and now on cloud sharing basis led by Apple, Google and Spotify. Shopping is now global with Amazon and Alibaba leading the way. Software and Content providers have already moved to cloud computing based on a subscription model. The next flow of technology is IOT with our day to day equipment and machines getting connected and providing the marketers with real-time data about usage pattern and habits. Household equipment like washing machines, refrigerators and speakers are now digitally connected. Cars are digitally connected with satellite navigation system. Healthcare is slowly adapting to the IOT model.

The further advancement is already breaking the news with AI combining IOT. Mobiles and Digital devices are now not only getting connected to the web of everything, but they are getting smarter also. With the least amount of intervention, devices are capable of delivering the personalised content to users. E.g., Apple SIRI and Google Voice already personalising the mobile experience with user voice feedback. Websites and Mobile apps are personalising and engaging the users by learning the behaviour pattern and delivering the relevant content and in parallel generating usage data which when combined caused BIG DATA, the next generation of Market Analysis.

Co Authored by
Avinash Teja
Kamera Nuthan Kumar

Jay Baviskar
Vineet Kumar
Richa Raj
All the authors are First Year MBA student at IIM Kozhikode