The financing business is a low margin and a high volume business where scalability is often the key as customer volumes often increase exponentially in particular months or seasons.  With volumes being the key, this business also requires agility as financial products such as personal loans, have to be processed faster. 

As Bajaj Finance, a prime player in the asset finance business, was relying on an IT application infrastructure consisting of a home grown CRM, Microsoft Access and a series of Excel spreadsheets, it was struggling to keep pace with the growth of business. This IT application infrastructure was not only difficult to scale, but also lacked accuracy as information was scattered across multiple systems. This was a challenging task as this task involved identifying close to 1.5 million eligible customers from a database of around six million and then managing these contacts through an end-to-end sales cycle.

This fuelled the need for a single CRM system that could take the headache out of managing both back office and front office functions to vastly improve loan turnaround times for processing of loans. A single platform CRM could also improve the firm’s ability to handle the company’s campaigns more efficiently. For example, customers with a good payment record could be targeted and offered personal loans.

To overcome this, Devang Mody, Business Leader – Sales & Finance, Bajaj Auto Finance, decided to take the cloud approach to eliminate the need to buy both the hardware as well as the software to achieve endless scalability—a key requirement for the company.

The firm chose a solution based on Salesforce.com that did not require the finance firm to channelize its resources into buying and maintaining hardware and software. It could instead free up critical time of the IT team for strategizing and focusing its energy in delivering what the business needed.

Bajaj moved its consumables financing and cross sell divisions into Salesforce.com, extending the functionality of cloud based CRM to 300 employees across more than 50 Indian cities. The firm went live on the Salesforce.com CRM system in April 2009. Subsequently, the firm used the system’s customization toolset to bring all major processes online. This included the integration of the call centre application dialer, credit bureau, and corporate mobile services. Salesforce.com also enabled the firm to roll out new products and processes across the distribution network quickly. The total cost of the implementation including customization and training cost the company just Rs 15 lakh.