Now on the cloud, CRM solutions for SMEs

Lokanathan Kutuva (36) and his brother Venkatesh (33) aspired to be entrepreneurs since their college days. Therefore, it was no surprise when they quit their lucrative jobs to start their own venture to provide customer relationship management (CRM) solutions for small and medium businesses.

“Every qualified SME should have access to an affordable and complete suite of CRM solutions. That’s what we are trying through Kreato,” said Lokanathan, Founder and CEO, Navrita Software Systems, which provides CRM solutions under the Kreato brand. He had an eight-year stint at Salzer before starting his own venture.

Software-as-a-service

Kreato is offered as a ‘Software-as-a-Service’ (SaaS) on the cloud. It is licensed on a subscription basis, which means that enterprises do not have to invest anything; they just have to pay a monthly fee.

Navrita will manage the cloud infrastructure with regular updates to Kreato. For SME users, it not only frees up precious management time, but also saves on capital expenditure. Kreato helps users manage leads, contacts, sales opportunities, marketing, activities, reports and all type of communications like telephony, SMS and email from a single location.

“For an SME, it costs ₹7,200 per year per seat for the CRM package. This is a tenth of a standard CRM solutions firm that includes servers and software,” said Venkatesh, who left Verizon to join his brother and is the technology in-charge at Navrita.

Nearly 50 clients, including Indiabulls, Nxtgen and PSSrijan Group, are using the product, he said. “These clients were acquired online,” he said.

As cloud facilitates the instant addition of virtual servers, Kreato automates and deploys the trial and production CRM portals for customers in a few minutes. However, in a non-cloud environment, it will take days. Kreato is an instantly scalable SaaS platform where customers can start with a minimal number of subscriptions and ramp up as their business grows.

A single solution

Absence of a supportive CRM ecosystem might limit capabilities of SMEs on achieving enriched CRM usage. However, Kreato has been built to address all the pain points in a single solution covering end-to-end customer lifecycle management. This covers marketing, sales and customer support and pre-integrated with required third party applications.

“We spent two years on research and development and another year to develop the product. They just need to plug-and-play the solutions and pay us per month,” said Lokanathan.

“It took us one year to get 50 paying customers and there are nearly 200 in the pipeline. We expect to have around 10,000 customers in three years,” he said.

“We have so far invested nearly ₹1 crore in the venture, and plan to raise funds for our next round of growth,” he said.