There are some signs at last that the economy is beginning to permanently turn around. Two of the biggest growth areas have been mobile and social channel products and services: which radically impact on firms interact and build and maintain relationships with customers.

So what do these trends mean for firms’ CRM strategies? TMCnet recently interviewed

Dileep Srinivasan who is Assistant Vice President, CRM, Social CRM, Digital Marketing and MDM, for Cognizant, which provides information technology, consulting, and business process outsourcing services.

TMCnet: What key trends are you seeing in CRM demand and applications and what are the drivers?

DS: Companies have realized significant cost savings and undertaken many cost take-outs over the last two years of the economic slowdown. Now, the companies view revenue growth, customer relationships and consumer experiences critical to drive their growth and attain competitive advantage. We see five trends shaping up the CRM industry in 2011 and beyond:

1. Broadband: The growth and easy availability of broadband and wireless means that it will permeate across every available living space

2. Mobile devices and apps: Mobile devices and applications are redefining the way consumers consume information. Information consumption today is focused on real time and collaborative communications, and the availability of information instantly. The preference is now towards simpler easy to use apps that provide instant access to information.

3. Cloud initiatives: Cloud is increasingly seen as an option in an organizations CRM strategy. Clients adopting cloud solutions are looking for continued cost take outs, business transformation, new business models and most of all simplification.

4. Digital channels: Digital channels are getting increasing attention in terms of budgets and focus. This also means there in increased focused beyond multichannel integration to cross channel integration.

5. Social media and social CRM: Social media and communities are enabling consumers and customers to take increasing control over the influence of products and services. The rise of crowd collaboration, influence and trust in the communities has raised the stakes for social CRM significantly. This along with the digital channels that they engage in has brought increasing prominence to analytics based on behavior and sentiments.

TMCnet: Is it now possible to untether the smartphones? How have going from 1-to-1 to 1-to-many i.e. social affected CRM strategies?
DS:What has made business and consumers to go mobile is the easy availability of broadband and the apps available on smartphones to consume 
information and to collaborate in a simplified and quick way.We believe that one significant factor that mobility has brought to business is reach. Hence, we believe there will be continued dominance of smartphones and tablets. This will drive newer CRM marketing efforts to enable businesses to reach its consumers instantly and to market its brand, products or services. This also means that traditional CRM will now be extended with the adoption of social CRM strategies and solutions, that will be content centric, conversation centric and community focused.

The move from 1-to-1 to 1-to-many is gradually enabling a whole new level of CRM whereby the individual has much more control of the relationship and the information flow than the enterprise.  By leveraging 1-to-many relationships, individuals can now gain insight into how the marketplace perceives the products and services being offered, and they can put this newly gained insight to work to find the best deals, the best service and the offering that best meets their needs.  And as location-based services start to gain acceptance, we may see a whole new level of personalization take hold.

TMCnet: CRM installations have been characterized as slow and expensive; sometimes the lead times have been so long the problems they were purchased to solve have disappeared. Are you seeing companies shorten the go-live and payback/ROI times and if so by how much today as compared to a year or 18 months ago? What CRM methods i.e. modular, hosted are buyers seeking in response? Discuss the advantages and challenges of these alternatives.

DS:      We don't see many transformational CRM projects that are huge and long ROI or project cycle based. We see organizations building a long term CRM vision, and accomplishing the same using point projects.

We also don’t see many mass scale replacement of traditional on premise CRM solutions with hosted or cloud solutions. What we see is newer point applications such as incentive compensation, territory alignment, collaboration solutions being adopted using cloud or SaaS solutions, while traditional core CRM solutions existing in organizations will be retained. 

And instead of the 'Big Bang' (News - Alert) rollouts of year's past, we are seeing a more thoughtful, gradual rollout - starting with POCs (Proof of Concept) followed by a departmental or divisional or regional rollout. This allows for the capture of lessons learned as well as a flexible, adaptive approach to rolling out the application that allows for changes and adjustments along the way. What this means is the organizations are more likely to adopt a hybrid model for CRM, rather than a large scale overnight transformation exercise in replacing existing CRM solutions.There are two advantages of such an approach. One is that it will primarily protect the investments already made and improve payback/ROI on newer point projects in addition to simplification such as freeing themselves from owning further infrastructure or the headache of constant upgrades to core application.Secondly, aid the use of adoption of newer business models that allow movement of capital expenditure to operating expense by the adoption of newer business models that allow to pay-for-use or pay-per-transaction.TMCnet:          What solutions have you and will be coming out in response to thesetrends? What has been the feedback from your customers?

DS:      Our customers are looking for solutions that provide them one or more ofthe following:

*  Assistance in building the new CRM roadmap that couples innovation with increased consumer intimacy
*  Increased efficiencies in their CRM systems that ensure better ROI and user adoption
*  Improved effectiveness of business processes that help them attain competitive advantage
*  Virtualization solutions that help them bring business user needs quickly and effectively
*  Customer and consumer analytics linked to their CRM systems that ensure better and effective cross channel marketing and integration with social communities and digital channels
*  A linkage for their CRM solution to social networks and social media

We at Cognizant (News - Alert) have aligned our practice structure to enable our clients to achieve the above needs. We are building solutions that cater to short time cycles, integrated with business use cases to enable customers to realize quick ROIs. And we have a built a team of core CRM strategic consultants to focus on implementing the new CRM visions for our clients and also help them build an effective social CRM strategy.

[At the same time] we are also working to bring out new cloud-based solutions that willfocus on the needs of customer analytics, territory alignment, business process management solutions and a sentiment analyzer solution that scouts the channels where consumers are engaged in and provides actionable insights that can be linked to their traditional CRM applications.

To learn more about social CRM firsthand attend the SocialCRM Expo that is taking place at ITEXPO (News - Alert) East, Feb.2-4 2011 in Miami. Fla.