How Centra Hub with its CRM & HCM solutions helping businesses reap the benefit of digitisation

In this new, contactless world, when most interactions with customers and employees are taking place virtually, Centra Hub with its customer relationship management (CRM) and human capital management (HCM) solutions helping businesses stay functional, organized, save time, and raise revenue. "Roles have changed, data collection has expanded, and the hybrid work model has become mainstream for almost every business. With rare exceptions, organizations that denied digitization experienced restricted activity and even forced shutdowns," says Nisith Naik, CEO, Centra Hub in an exclusive interview with Bizz Buzz. He also explains how the company's solution can help organizations become profitable

How do CentraHub solutions help small, medium, and large companies in their day-to-day operations?

Our customer relationship management (CRM) and human capital management (HCM) solutions include valuable tools for businesses that rely on digital processes. They help organizations stay functional, stay organized, save time, and raise revenue. The industry-ready systems are implemented faster, and businesses could start actualizing their benefits almost instantly, at a high level.

For businesses dealing with seemingly endless sales, marketing, human resource management, payroll, and other complex ventures, our CRM and HCM solutions provide intuitive and customizable dashboards, making it effortless for them to stay on task. More advanced tools like forecasting and AI-powered assistants are added to support businesses to automate and scale any workflow. Integration capabilities with an extensive range of platforms enable our solutions to help organizations integrate and streamline the 3rd-party applications businesses need to easily automate repeated tasks to improve workflows and accomplish business goals.

Could you elaborate on how the company solutions complement the country's digital initiatives?

Our CRM and HCM solutions support all the key trends that need to be incorporated to enable businesses to take up digital initiatives. They allow organizations to re-evaluate their operations and adapt to new market realities. These days customer behaviours and expectations are in constant change. Organizations need to experiment with their business model and frame strategies that could create new revenue streams.

Here mobility plays a crucial role. Our business solutions offer that. The systems allow users to always access data and resources, share information in real-time, and improve communication and collaboration at work as well as with customers. The collaborative suite of applications allows users to manage historical data and analyze this information to optimize business activities holistically across the organization, execute critical business functions, and prepare organizations for upcoming new trends. All these collectively complement digitization.

Can you give a detailed overview of how the software helps automate processes?

Our solutions streamline business processes through a series of workflows. These systems include tools that analyze historical data and based on the outcome, automate campaign management, email marketing, call scheduling, lead qualification, payroll processing, candidate short-listing, customer service, and complete other menial and repetitive tasks.

What are some of the challenges that MSMEs and SMEs face, and what is the impact on their business?

Digital transformation has brought massive success to businesses across the globe and industries.

But their adaptation rate is still very low. This is because MSMEs and SMEs face some challenges in digitizing their businesses. They are often scared of the magnitude of work and investment that goes into digital transformation, and many do not even try. The reality is that now business solutions are available in SaaS models, and businesses just must pay as much as they are going to use.

Another primary concern is the unavailability of a skilled workforce who can take up the responsibility of business solution deployment. This creates significant pressure on MSMEs and SMEs to go digital. We offer a solution for this. As a CRM and HCM software provider, we offer assistance to our customers from the time they connect with us to implementation and support thereafter. Not knowing where to start is a common problem with MSMEs and SMEs. Taking baby steps towards choosing the technology and seeking assistance from experts could make the process of going digital smoother. By being skeptical of digitization, MSMEs and SMEs often struggle to optimize their business operations. This could result in the sector experiencing low levels of profitability and growth.

What is the importance of CRM/HCM and automation, especially for MSMEs and SMEs?

Customers and clients always look for the best experience irrespective of the kind of services or products they purchase. Even though small businesses have a small customer base, appropriately serving them is most difficult without an automation tool. It could hinder the building of long-term relationships. This resonates with the employee experience. Therefore, it is wise for MSMEs and SMEs to put in place every measure to establish a loyal relationship with their existing as well as potential customers and employees.

Most business activities include reaching out to prospects, resolving customer complaints, designing special offers, marketing, hiring employees, processing payrolls, and so on. All these could be automated either using CRM or HCM software. When businesses offer excellent services to customers and take great care of employee interests, it leads to happier customers and more productive employees, ultimately boosting business growth.

Can the benefits to companies be measured in monetary terms?

Yes. Every benefit, whether it is improved employee working conditions, quality customer support or field service, or any other improvements, even if they are not reflected in the company's accounting records or financial statements impacts the revenues or expenses. Therefore, they could be measured in monetary terms.

What is the impact it can create for their business and for the Indian economy?

We live in an era where technology is leveraged to surface innovative ideas from anyone within an organization. Old assumptions about the heavy expenses of spurring innovation have changed. Now the technology used is more affordable and more understandable. Our CRM and HCM solutions are designed to unlock the full business potential and productivity of a company, which brings in profitability that directly contributes to the improvement of the country's economy. They just need well-trained teams that can make most of the software systems and help the company get going.

What is the industry landscape post-Covid and why was there a sudden need for businesses to digitize processes for efficient operations?

Covid-19 has left a lasting impact on the future of work. Social distancing and lockdown have accelerated the trend of remote working and automation. This made the organizations evaluate the immediate and longer-term impact of these trends and how far they had to alter their strategic goals and plans to support them.

In this new, contactless world, most interactions with customers and employees needed to occur virtually. Roles have changed, data collection has expanded, and the hybrid work model has become mainstream for almost every business. With rare exceptions, organizations that denied digitization experienced restricted activity and even forced shutdowns. This created an immediate need for them to digitize their business processes and provide secure access to employees to ensure continuation.

What's the number of businesses that have shown significant improvement after adopting such technology?

Quarantine and extended work-from-home forced organizations to digitize business processes to reimagine nearly every aspect of their operations. This crisis acted as a catalyst to speed up the change for good. A significant improvement after adopting digital technology is seen in almost all sectors, from healthcare to education, manufacturing to retail, and more. As the world reopens, we analyze the industries that have adopted digital business processes, thrived the critical time, and have become more efficient.

Being contactless gave consumers a safer, cleaner way to make payments, and being virtual helped them gain more control over physical proximity. Digitization remains the new way of working, and everyone, businesses, and customers, wholeheartedly adapted it.

How cost-friendly and efficient are your solutions considering the investments required to be made?

If one were to do a price-to-feature comparison of our product with other competing solutions available in the market with similar modules and features, the pricing of Centra is the most economical tier-2 application in the market. In fact, we offer almost tier-1 flexibility in terms of customization and scope and the prices are at the bottom of tier-2 price matrix.

With integrated built-in AI with our solutions, the efficiency of the solutions has increased almost by 20-25 per cent. The automation and ease of data entry, slicing and dicing of standard reports well within the application to get any analytical report and predictive analysis and forecasting are few of the salient features which help improve the overall efficiency of the product.