Customer information management (CIM) is the driving force behind customer calls from back offices like contact centres and call centres.With increasing telecom penetration and extension of banking services bringing more customers into the fold, growth is set to take off for IT technologies like CIM. G Shankaran Nair, president, corporate strategy, Servion Global Solutions?a company which offers software CIM solutions? spoke to FE?s S Saroj Kumar on the software solutions part of $6.6-billion global CRM market. Excerpts:
What is your CIM market share and how did you fare last year ?
In revenue terms, we are on a symmetrical scale in 3 major markets, having 33% share each in US, APAC and domestic markets. This symmetry of our revenue stream helped us when the recession had rattled the US and APAC , leaving the Indian market untouched, especially its telecom and banking sectors. Peering into the past of domestic markets, one can see that banking alone had registered an impressive 34.5% growth and telecom continued to grow to breach the halfway mark of penetrating 500 million customers. The US still reels under large unemployment and declining consumer spending However, we were able to clock around $ 22 million in revenue last year.
IT vendors consider the US as a powerhouse of global IT spending. What are your views?
Around 70% of CIM is made up of hardware and the rest, software. We cater to this niche segment. In fact, we are in the race for the small slice of the big CIM pie that remains unfazed despite the market volatility. Job losses in the US have shrunk the target market for various customer services and further diminishing the possibility of business to enterprises like contact centres and call centres that run various sales and service campaign reaching out to millions of end customers. It is of little wonder that this lull had a contagious and cascading impact on CIM vendors in both hardware and software.
What will propel the growth in the US market?
The trend that we anticipate is the innovation of the CIM-based delivery process. It will be not just a telephone sales executive selling or servicing a customer on phone, there would inclusion of innovative processes becoming part of the call play like speech recognition, video recognition, tapping of social network sites all imbedded to enhance customer buying intelligence. As the market is saturated, the challenge here is to address the replacement resistance by stressing the mission critical aspect of the deployment of new software and hardware that would enable newer innovative CIM-based delivery process.
What would drive the growth in emerging markets?
In countries like India and China, it would be the sheer volume and scale. The sustained high growth of customer intensive industries like banks and telcos would spur the growth of call centres and contact cenres, which, in turn require large scale deployments of CRMs and CIM hardware and software solutions.