In a country like India where the bulk of the population is most comfortable with a voice based system for search over using the web; the majority of people who visit your website are what we would call window shoppers in the real world. They’re there to look around, contemplate, learn, compare and at the end of it leave without actually making a purchase. Then there are those who have made up their minds and are ready to proceed to the check out; and this is the group that most businesses are interested in. There are numerous great avenues to locate this group and one of the most important one happens to be the leading local search engine, Just Dial.  With immediate access to fast, reliable and comprehensive information on businesses, products and services across India, Just Dial is every business and prospects’ delight.

Those of you who use Just Dial for lead generation understand what we call the “Quick mover advantage”. The concern with Just Dial leads is if you’re not fast enough, you’re not good enough. The first company to reach out to the prospect is most likely to win the deal. Impel CRM integrated with Just Dial is what will ensure that your business stays one step ahead of the rest.

With Impel CRM integrated with your Just Dial service, all your Just Dial leads land directly into Impel. No worries that the person to whose mail ID or mobile phone number you’ve provided to Just Dial may miss out on a lead. Once the lead is in Impel, we can set up different business rules, including the Round Robin assignment to assign each lead to a particular sales person from your team so that he/she can follow up immediately and increase the chance of turning the prospect into a customer. The criteria for lead assignment can range from sales people to location to product, to whatever suits your business type. An SMS/E-mail alert is sent to your sales person as soon as the lead is assigned, so that he/she can immediately follow up with the prospect. An acknowledgement SMS/E-mail also goes out to the prospect to keep them engaged throughout the sales cycle.

Gone are the days when you would spend precious time scanning through your phones to locate that one prospect’s number; with Impel CRM your lead list derived from Just Dial is tidily organized in your system giving you more time to spend on the actual selling process. Start at the roots. Nurture and watch your customer base grow with Impel CRM. Powerful engagement is what will lead to multiple purchases in the future.

So come, see how Impel CRM and Just Dial help your business grow quickly.

Come and take a look at our new and improved website at www.impelcrm.in, We’ve changed our website and introduced a fresh new look to our flagship CRM product, Impel. This change is a part of Impel’s continued transformation to reinforce quality and easy availability of product information.

The main aim of the new-look site, which is designed in a slider format, is to improve the ease of navigation and enhance the user experience for visitors to the site. It offers quick and easy access to the most important features in Impel.

To complement the new-look website, we have also updated the product login page to accommodate a ‘Did You Know’ section which takes you through the various Impel features. With Impel, we are constantly adding new features to the product. But as a user, you may not always be aware of new features that be may be of immense use to you. So here’s an easy way to keep in touch. Whenever you login to Impel, you get to see a new feature that you may not have  been aware of.

We are constantly looking at ways to improve the customer experience and will be rolling out some more innovative developments over the remainder of the year. So keep a look out and do let us know what you think of the new look.

The answer to this question is a big yes! Any business, small or big, understands that the customer holds the key to their success. And a happy customer makes for a happy business. But how do you ensure that a customer stays happy? This is where Customer Relationship Management comes in. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy that focuses on building strong relationships with customers across all departments. CRM reduces costs, increases efficiency and improves customer satisfaction.

Finding the right CRM solution for your Business is the golden ticket to a content bunch of customers. Impel CRM is a low-cost easy to use CRM for small businesses. The CRM system is built around customers, keeping in mind all their needs and wants. What better way to ensure customer satisfaction than provide them with a service that is custom made for them!

What makes Impel worth while is the ease at which you can gather information across departments. With relevant analysis of information from sales, support and marketing; a business is made aware of exactly where things are going right and where they are not. This is essentially important for smaller enterprises as they cannot afford to exceed their operational costs.

With Impel, you can take over from exactly where you left with a particular customer and enjoy a 360 degree view which lists all recent transactions and activities of that particular customer. Impel CRM acts as a digital diary where you can find a record among thousands, locate decade old customer histories/activities- all within seconds in one integrated system.

A customer relationship management solution like Impel comes as a blessing in the strenuous atmosphere for the SME; as opposed to the contradictory perception that a CRM adds to the already bustling backdrop and cost of a small business. Impel CRM not only helps take your existing customer relationships a step further but can also help in expanding your customer base. Its time to strengthen your customer relationships with Impel CRM.

Recently, we had a new customer bail – meaning, not renew after the first payment. That bothers us immensely – the money is hardly the issue (after all, our pricing is so low…); we just feel upset that our product is not good enough for someone who signed up after a 15-day free EVAL. Well, our guys tracked down the decision-makers and guess what? They’d quit the company! The two key people who brought us in had moved on just a few weeks after bringing us in. Looking closely at the LinkedIn profile of one of those managers, we kicked ourselves for not noticing this earlier: he’d polished up his profile over the past few weeks, added skills (even a new phone number!) and had recently connected to HR managers and people at various head-hunting firms. So he’d obviously been “looking”, so to speak, having spent nearly four years at his current job.

After I got over my s#%&-scary-what-LinkedIn-can-tell-you-about-someone thoughts, I thought about the equivalent in our own lives: we just polished up our website and brought in a new logo. No, we’re not looking for a new job as a company or a new market to sell our software into (as our recently-moved customer-manager was): honestly, we just wanted a CHANGE (now, how many tech-job-interviews have I heard THAT in?). We were happy with the way the website looked. We were proud of the home-grown logo we’d designed three years ago. We were thrilled that we could add content and modify things thanks to the Drupal content manager we had in place. But yet… we’d gotten accustomed to the look of the website and, unlike Professor Pickering, we wanted to change it all. That’s it – no deep rebranding thoughts, no great strategic shifts, nothing as earthshaking as new management or new directions: just CHANGE.

Having decided to make the change, though, we asked ourselves a tough question: What should the change DO for us? We made a list of things we’d like to see the new website convey. We made a list of the attributes the new logo must convey. We made a list of the things that we did NOT want to change. And so on – lots of lists in lots of emails. Surekha signed up with JadeMagnet and asked for new logo designs. Sahana worked with website designers to get ideas for the new website. She roped in Govardhan to help a contractor implement the new design in our instance of Drupal. Surekha tweaked, re-tweaked and yet again re-tweaked the logo via JadeMagnet till she got what she wanted. And we finally rolled out the new design two weeks ago.

The logo took some work, I will admit. The crowd-sourced paradigm works very well, but that’s not the issue at all here. We wanted something that satisfied a number of sometimes-conflicting requirements. It had to be:

• Simple
• Colourful in an unfussy manner
• Usable in near-identical form online and as the app icon on tablets and phones.

What we finally accepted, I am thrilled to say, is all of that and more. It conveys the basic sense of simplicity and stability that Impel brings as a platform, with its connectivity to back-end systems on the one side and its availability on mobile devices on the other. It shows the variety of things that customers can use Impel for, from Sales Force Automation to Consumer Marketing, from selling capital equipment costing lakhs of rupees in large cities to selling agricultural products in rural India.

Ultimately, this website and logo change is like our own SaaS CRM offering: something new every few weeks, something dramatically different every few months. Like Surekha says, Change is the only constant.

PS Note to that gentleman who was “looking”: on LinkedIn, there’s a setting to stop telling people whom you’re connecting with. And LinkedIn very helpfully tells you to do that if you’re looking for a job…

OK, so you’ve probably been following the rise of the Tablet Computer, all the way to the aakash. And you’ve been thinking that this is the natural progression of computing technology: people who used computers can now be untethered, using a tablet wherever they go. Right? WRONG! If anything, the tablet changes the game in the sense that it puts the power of computing in the hands of people who never had it before. Right now, there’s a unique combination of circumstances that make for an amazing story in India:

• An omnipresent mobile network – everywhere you need to be, with a GPRS connection
• Fast-growing markets for consumer goods and services – even in rural India
• Rising cost of field sales, particularly due to unavailable or under-trained resources.

Yes, the increase in cost of sales is an opportunity, not a threat – an opportunity to deploy tablet devices in the field and increase salesperson effectiveness.

This combination is much more potent than anything the West is seeing – and we see that already with some of our customers. Some of our competitors are working hard on rolling out great-looking tablet versions of their software. Working hard – most of them don’t have anything out there yet. But regardless, they’re working on giving their users the best possible user-experience on an Android tablet or an iPad, making sure it looks good and works well. We, on the other hand, think that there are a bunch of things that are very different about India. Here:

• The tablet is not about users getting another way to get to their data; it is about people who would otherwise never get to use software.
• It is not about delivering data to the user in the field (although some of that needs to be done); it is about COLLECTING data from the field.
• It is not about access to lots of structured data; it is about the creation and delivery of video content in the field.
• It is not about users being able to use personal devices of various types and sizes (InfoWorld even has a whole “strategy” white paper about “BYOD”, as it is called); it is about the company buying tablets for their salespeople and mandating its use.
• It is not about threatening the privacy of the salesperson via geo-tracking; it is about increasing his/her effectiveness in unmapped territories.

Given this reality, we also took a different approach to engineering our solution. The typical problem for mobile software development is the variety of devices one needs to support. We, on the other hand, agonized less over the various mobile “platforms” we’d have to support and focused instead on making Impel Touch work well on the most relevant devices for our customers. Using HTML5 and related technologies, we worked on delivering a top-notch product on low-end devices – devices that we expect to see in the hands of people selling seeds in villages, administering primary medical care in towns or installing and supporting high-value equipment in cities. Along the way, we built a variety of user-interfaces that are not typical in the apps we’ve seen, given the large amounts of data we need to handle (400-odd villages in a pick-list!).

The devices themselves are an interesting sidelight. Every day, there are new players in the market, offering new configurations. We discovered, though, that the combination that our customers need is not that common – yet. For example:

• Customers want in-field data sync back to Impel, so managers can track and help sales and support people. But a number of devices on the market have only WiFi, not GPRS.
• Managers want GPS tracking of where sales and support people go, so sales and installation locations can be recorded for later use. Some of the devices don’t support GPS yet.
• Users want front and back cameras, since they want to chat with their co-workers but also be able to record product usage, customer testimonials, etc. on video. A number of tablets have one or the other, not both.
• Battery back-up is critical, especially when field personnel are away from power sources for hours on end. Some of the devices, though, offer just a couple of hours of use without recharging – especially with GPS on.
• Longevity is important, both for device and vendor. But even the biggest brands are offering newer and newer devices every few weeks, with older models being dumped immediately. That’s very troubling for customers that need a solution to work for years, not weeks.

But the good thing is that there are ways to surmount these challenges and roll out an effective and affordable solution TODAY. With Impel Touch, you can truly have your feet on the street and head in the Cloud. Come talk to us about how!