Hyderabad based Maytas Properties commenced operations in 2005 focusing on real estate and property development. It is currently involved in residential townships and commercial buildings, retail infrastructure, hotels and setting up SEZs. Maytas has several projects in the pipeline and expects to complete 25 million sq ft in the next three years.

Maytas Properties recently selected Salesforce Enterprise Edition as its CRM solution. The company required a solution to address its overall sales force related problems and one that could be easily implemented.

Need for simple and easy to implement solution

Srinivas Sagi, CIO of Maytas informed that earlier their sales personnel used to manage the customer relation activity through reporting in spreadsheets. Different spreadsheets were used by different sales individual to upload the information pertaining to customer interaction. As these spreadsheets were not integrated the information known by one personnel could not be shared with another. Due to this the past customer interactions could not be retrieved in real time, which often resulted in customer dissatisfaction. Also sales personnel were not able to manage the leads very effectively.

After evaluating various solutions Maytas decided to implement a web based hosted solution as against an on premise solution. Explaining the reason behind the move, Sagi said, “The on premise solution would have taken much more investment in terms of time, cost and number of people,”

Smooth Implementation

Being a hosted solution the customisation and implementation went on smoothly. The implementation was relatively smooth and the software was flexible in meeting our business needs, informed Sagi. Maytas also called for some customisation which included inventory, blocking and booking of the units, specific to the infrastructure and property development vertical.

Though the solution didn't have any high-end hardware requirements the company had to increase its bandwidth to 2 Mbps in order to ensure continuous web availability to its users. Maytas has acquired 20 desktop and 10 mobile user licenses. The solution was implemented about 3 months back and the complete deployment took 9-10 weeks at a cost of less than Rs 10 Lakhs.

Increased staff efficiency and customer satisfaction

The automation of processes has resulted in the end users delight, easy work flow and less burden on human memory as the system is taking care of all important matters which before the CRM implementation was executed manually. The solution has primarily helped to increase the efficiency of sales force. It helps to identify the significant leads and categorises them on the basis of their potential, i.e., most potential, moderate potential, etc.

The solution provides complete information about existing leads and customer, as and when required. Where as earlier customer had to speak to two three personals, now they have a single point of contact and need not recall their earlier interaction as this data is already available in the system. A customer can also know the status of their complaints if any without any hassles. This has significantly increased the customer satisfaction and retention at Maytas. The solution has been integrated with the Maytas’s backend JDE ERP system which has made processes more transparent. Sagi also informed that with the help of App Exchange (again from Salesforce.com) they can access the application anywhere from the world with their Blackberry and can guide their sales force at any time.

Even after considering all the visible benefits of a hosted solution the question remained was there any anxiety over the application availability and data security? Sagi answered, “According to our information, Salesforce.com never actually went down except few cases. They provide prior information if there is any maintenance activity. Salesforce is the most widely used web application with excellent track record of data security, this summed up our security concerns.”

Maytas is keen to implement a solution for data and supply chain management in near future.