Social media is an asset for businesses

While businesses and
organizations are keen to make their presence on the social media
front, they still fall short on leveraging the social media platform
in generating business and commerce. Addressing those business needs,
Talisma Corporation recently launched Social CRM and Performance
Analytics solutions in India. In this interview, Raj Mruthyunjayappa,
MD, APAC and EMEA, Talisma Corporation talks to Pankaj Maru of
CyberMedia News about the company's latest offering, its benefits
and adoptions, key verticals and potential customers in India.

Excerpts:

How can Social CRM help
businesses?

Today most businesses want
to know their customers' feedback and they collect it in various
forms. However, the feedback collected by businesses may or may not
reflect the true sentiments and experience of customers because many
a times customers take a neutral position as they don't want to
offend others. But with the Internet and social media like Facebook,
Twitter and other tools, today lots of conversations are happening
over it; especially today's youth are talking, tweeting, communicating,
sharing
experiences or commenting using mobile phones instantaneously. And
today social media has become an online engine to drive
conversations, and even companies are driving publicity campaigns
using social media. Social media here is the next big thing now,
especially with mobility solutions that make social media
mobile-enabled for quick conversations. So from the business
perspective, this is a huge asset for businesses and companies, if
they can build brand, value or brand equity on social media and can
reach out to customers and the right kind of audiences. But for that
they will need to have the right kind of social media strategy and
invest in it.

Though most companies have
websites or fan page or Facebook, which is socially integrated with
their organization, where you get the latest information or messages
about various activities, there is no social commerce or business
associated. So we try to enable businesses integrate with social
commerce in various ways such as branding, building values, measuring
users' sentiments and influencing the customers' ability of
buying, which can lead to social commerce.

Which are the verticals
that could adopt Social CRM? Do you have any pilot customers in
India?

I think BFSI, telecom and
education verticals will adopt Social CRM. We have customers in
Australia and the UK; in India at least 20 customers have shown
interest to go on Social CRM including two banks and an insurance
company. However, when a customer approaches us, we first make sure
they have a social media strategy, guide them; then it makes sense
for them to leverage the Social CRM application. Customers need to
have a social plan about what they want to achieve and do with social
media and also infrastructure should be in place to react to
responses because without any infrastructure, you cannot do with just
the tools.

What is the worth of
the social analytics market?

It is an untested market
but as per our internal assessment, we think the global market is
worth around $500-600 mn and it would be around $20 mn in India.

How would you be
offering the Social CRM and Analytics solutions?

For us, social media is
another channel and this channel alone cannot give you the entire
viewpoint of experience of the customers and you still need your core
channels such as chat channels, online channels and others. We look
at this as an overall gala of offerings and social media could be one
of the offering and customers can pick and choose as per their
requirements. We offer both on software-as-a-service as well as
on-premise solution and based on the customers' business model they
can choose and pick the solution.