Iron age Businesses v/s Silicon age Businesses

Iron Age businesses were more focused on operational efficiencies, deliveries, finance and administration compared to Silicon age businesses which are more focused on one most important aspect of their business and that are Customers.

Silicon age Businesses understand importance of Customers viz their Products and Services, giving focus to Customer because once a Customer is comfortable with “You”, he will be your customer forever and your products and services keep changing with changing times and economies.Silicon age companies use high end IT solutions to cater their customers and provide them world class service, answer their queries and resolve their complaints and shortest possible time to enhance customer experience while dealing with companies; traditionally an ERP system was considered to help organization in optimizing operations but ERP system puts Operations and Finance on top and Customer on bottom of Pyramid.

According to Thomas Abraham, CEO of Sage Software India, for any organization their BEST Sales force is their Customers and Word of Mouth is best method of advertisement and it is the proven fact in sales world over. A good CRM product can help people achieve this pretty easily and make them transform from a Iron Age system to a Silicon Age system” Silicon age companies have realized that ERP is cart for their Business and CRM solution is Horse, without Horse you cannot use cart efficiently and you will need loads of Cart Pushers increasing costs of operations; an effective and fast Horse can make your business faster and achieve business goals and increase your top line and bottom line very faster. A CRM solution justifies ROI faster compared to an ERP system which takes years to justify investments.

Jitendra Somani, COO of Greytrix and implementer of integrated CRM-ERP solution at various multinationals opines “An icing on cake would be integration of your Horse and your cart, in other words an end to end integrated solution which can not only track your Production but can also track who is using your product or service and how satisfied end-user is with your services or products giving you a 360 degree view of your business, enable your sales force and customer support to get an insights into customer habits, buying patterns and overall customer satisfaction index.”

A good example for this type of solution would be Sage CRM solution offered by world’s leading SME software giant Sage Software, Sage provides a scalable solution where you can start with basic Sales Force automation and move on to next level of your customer centric activities like Targeted Marketing, Customer Support, Customer Self Service Portal with integration to back office ERP system giving your sales and service team a 360 degree view of sales and support life cycle.

Few of key challenges faced by SME segment is reluctance of their workforce to adapt to new technology due to constrains like difficult software processes, geographical diversity and limited exposure to technology; Sage CRM addresses these challenges by providing a world class web based architecture with very simple to use familiar web based user interface; Apart from this Sage CRM offers Role based interface so a user does not need to learn entire software to function on software, they just have to learn their area of responsibilities thus making entire CRM rollout very fast and leverage functionalities in base year of implementation of CRM software and organization can reap benefits of CRM immediately.