Why Indian Enterprises Prioritize Software Spending

Why Indian Enterprises Prioritize Software Spending

3 min read

Despite challenging economic conditions, the enterprise software market in India is projected to reach $3.92 billion in 2013, a 13.9% growth over 2012 revenue of $3.45 billion. Indeed, in 2013, India will be the fourth largest enterprise software market in Asia/Pacific. Gartner, a global technology analyst firm, attributes this growth to the following trends:

“Growing maturity of Indian users is an important driver for overall growth. Compounding the demand is the ongoing tendency for greater customer services along with the continued drive for IT cost savings, as well as the incorporation of emerging technologies into solutions, such as mobility, social, cloud and business process management. These new technologies, and demand for agility, brings in additional urgency, and demand, for IT investments.”

As Gartner points out, Indian enterprises are investing in transformative technology solutions primarily in order to achieve 2 things:

  1. Lower Operational Costs
  2. Better Customer Service.

Mobile applications for field force automation are one great example of the kinds of solutions that are enabling these two benefits. For example, Uniphore worked with one of India’s largest NBFCs, which employs over 6,000 field agents across India in sales and collections. These agents typically travel extensively in their territories to acquire new customers and service existing customers. Traditionally, they filled out the appropriate paper form for each transaction, and mailed the completed paperwork to their administrative headquarters at the end of each day. The time it took to fill out the forms, deliver them to HQ, wait for HQ to complete the processing and finally receive the administrative revert, was hampering field agent productivity and negatively affecting customer satisfaction.

Mobility Connecting Indian Enterprises

The solution Uniphore provided essentially eased each step of the sales process. For each operation – lead capture, followup, document collection, feasibility reporting, etc. – the agent opens the relevant application on their phone, and enters the appropriate information. Each form can be filled out through either text or voice inputs, depending on the preference and literacy level of the agent.

Moreover, field agents also have access to their record of activities and reports on the status of each lead. When dealing with customers, the field agents can immediately handle queries, as their interaction history with that customer is easily accessible. Furthermore, every time a customer does a payment or has a meeting with the agent, they get an SMS as a confirmation of the engagement.

Using this same platform, the company builds and disseminates new forms, alerts, and updates, and sends them to particular agents or categories of agents. Furthermore, if a customer query comes into the company’s hotline, the administration can route the query to the agent who is responsible for that particular customer, enabling the agent to respond immediately.

The entire Mobility Solution is hosted on the cloud, allowing the business to embrace a pay-as-you-grow model with limitless scalability. Using this solution, field agents now achieve a lot more in a single meeting with a customer because the company can now process information and revert with decisions to its agents in real time. This has reduced the average sales cycle drastically, allowing agents to close a sale in just two meetings, down from four meetings from before. This reduction in customer visits directly translates to a decrease in travels costs for the business by as much as 50%.

A more efficient service provider always translates into more satisfied customers. In this case, the ability for the administrator to route queries from their overall system directly to the agent on their mobile phone, means that the agent can respond to the customer more immediately. This has enhanced both customer service as well as customer loyalty to the company.

With benefits like this, no wonder the Indian market for software solutions continues to rise dramatically.

About Uniphore: Uniphore Technologies Inc is the leader in Multi lingual speech-based software solutions. Uniphore’s solutions allow any machine to understand and respond to natural human speech, thus enabling humans to use the most natural of communication modes, speech, to engage and instruct machines. Uniphore operates from its corporate headquarters at IIT Madras Research Park, Chennai, India and has sales offices in Middle East (Dubai, UAE) as well as in Manila, Philippines.

 

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