SYMBIOSIS INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT STUDIES

CRM

Assignment-2

Interview with a
Relationship Manager

STUDENT NAME Naveen Khola

DIVISION A
ROLL NUMBER 58
PRN NUMBER 20020441152
I, Naveen Khola, conducted a telephonic interview with Yashpal Kothari, Relationship
Manager at Byju’s. Yashpal has been one of my best friends from engineering days and
has been working at Byju’s for the past 3 years. He first started there as a sales executive
and later transitioned into a relationship manager.

Interviewer: Can you give some insights about your roles and responsibilities as a
relationship manager at Byju’s?

Interviewee: My main roles are building and maintaining positive relationships with
customers, assisting with generating new business, overlooking my sales team and
identifying opportunities to create profits. Under these I have many responsibilities
related to the customers like understanding their needs and developing plans to fulfil
them, building long-term relationships and work quickly to address and resolve their
issues. My other responsibilities include communicating new sales and cross-selling
opportunities to my sales team and encouraging them to do more sales and give excellent
customer service, along with assisting in maintaining a positive brand image.

Interviewer: Since you’ve worked both as a sales manager and relationship manager
can you give me some insight regarding the difference in their roles. Also can you
tell why a relationship manager is important for an Edtech company?

Interviewee: To put it simply, a Sales Manager offers one product or a product line to
many customers. A Sales manager is a skimmer, who moves on once the product is sold.
He may not be involved in resell or cross sell opportunities. A Relationship manager offers
many products to one customer. His position is of a one-point contact for all the
customer’s needs. He will usually upsell, cross sell, resolve issues within multiple
departments within the organisation as per the requirements of his customer.

Relationship managers is important for an Edtech company as he works with both the
company and customers to develop connections. Client relationship management and
company relationship management are the two types of relationship management. Both
fields have the goal of promoting positive relationships so that organisations can
maximise the value of such relationships while also maintaining a positive reputation.

Interviewer: As a relationship manager, which metrics do you think are most

important to track?

Interviewee: According to me there a few important metrics that every relationship

manager should track like:
 Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
 Customer Retention Cost
 Length of Sales Cycle
 Customer Acquisition Cost
 Net Promoter Score – to measure customer experience and satisfaction
Interviewer: Can you tell us a bit about the CRM model used by Byju’s focusing a bit
on the processes and strategies that enables Byju’s to maintain relationship with
their customers?

Interviewee: Most of our CRM activities especially after this pandemic at Byju’s are
centred around our CRM software LeadSquared. When a student downloads and registers
for the app, they are considered a lead in LeadSquared. His contact information, such as
his phone number and email address, is saved in the system. Now that he's signed up,
he'll be doing a lot of things. He might go through the math classes, for example, and then
jump to other chapters within that area. They are given a score for each activity that they
participate in. This total score is then used to rank them in order of priority. This instructs
our salesperson on who to contact first and why. Right now we have started integrating
this same feature on our social media platforms as well with the main focus on assessing
how the customers are interacting there.

We also make extensive use of the automated function to communicate with students
depending on their previous behaviour. One student, for example, is re-downloading the
app for the upcoming academic year. Another student views a few of movies before taking
a quiz. Another that has been inactive for six months is revived. As a result, we need to
interact differently with each student, and automated workflows assist us in doing so.

Interviewer: Like you said the CRM Software LeadSquared has played a big part in
the growth of Byju’s, can you tell how has LeadSquared benefitted your company?

Interviewee: We were previously utilising a CRM with which we were dissatisfied. It was
used in conjunction with Excel and Google. When we considered implementing a new
system, one of our main concerns was system adoption. The team may not believe that
learning and implementing a new tool is worthwhile. There were two elements that
influenced our selection when we were considering LeadSquared:
 Flexibility
 Ease of adoption

LeadSquared’s CRM tool helps us acquire new students, engage them through targeted
communication, track and guide sales teams and get performance analytic reports. We
have a large crew, which means we have unique needs and requirements. Within 20-30
minutes, LeadSquared assisted us in setting up an account and getting it up and running.
The support team is always available to assist us, so even if we require a new procedure,
they will create it right away.

LeadSquared isn't just used by our sales team. Our post-sales team, as well as our presales
team, use LeadSquared. We even utilise LeadSquared to keep track of our orders.

Interviewer: The covid-19 pandemic has brought about several changes in the
working of companies especially in the case of Byju’s where the executives earlier
even met the customers’ in person to build up good relationship. How do you think
the incorporation of CRM has changed to maintain the same relationship after the
covid-19 pandemic?
Interviewee: One the advantages covid-19 had mainly on Ed-tech sector is how parents
understood that the future lies in online learning as no one knows when we’ll be back to
the new normal. For us only a few things changed, instead of earlier where majority of
our sales were done on phone calls and meeting them in person, it changed to scheduling
online meetings. But we also made sure our representatives were only a phone call away
to answer any query raised by the parents and the students.

Interviewer: For a big company like Byju’s, what goes into incorporating a new CRM
tool? Also, what are the obstacles that you might come across while incorporating
them?

Interviewee: This process is actually undertaken by senior management team but as far
as my knowledge goes it starts with mapping the customer journey. Then we see the
conversion at each stage and also take employee and customer feedback into
consideration. We figure out if there’s a gap lying anywhere and then think of ways to fill
it, sometimes it can be done with tweaking a few things in the process but sometimes
there comes a need to incorporate a new CRM strategy. Then we go through the various
options, access which one is the best to solve our issue. We look at the economic feasibility
and also how well the employees will be able to adopt it, before implementing the CRM
tool.
Recommendations:
1) Byju’s still lacks in consumer interaction and behaviour tracking after the sales is
made. There are a lot of CRM tools that can be utilized for this purpose. Its
implementation can be used to improve user experience, have targeted marketing,
improve operations and increase loyalty and retention.
2) One of the key problems which still lies in Byju’s is that there are standardized courses
for all students. Softwares can be used for AI powered psychometric and interest
assessment of students and also for customizing courses to help each student perform
to the best of their potential.
3) A new app for parents (customers) where they can track how the course is going and
how much portion has been covered. Along with seeing how their children (consumers)
are performing in the tests. This app can also be used to promote other additional courses
which can go along the current course.
4) The use of Slack which is not a CRM, but it does integrate with other CRM softwares to
help organisations bring their people and tools together in one place so they can stay
productive and aligned from anywhere. By using Slack and your CRM together, teams
can easily stay in the loop on leads allowing them to respond faster to new opportunities
and collaborate seamlessly with colleagues across the organisation.
5) With Byju’s taking in semi-urban and rural population as their costumers, one of the
arising issues is the inability of these new customers to get accustomed with the website
and app technology. The customer service department is also not able to fully help them
out. Incorporation of automated chatbots, interactive FAQs and tutorial video series,
all in regional languages can be used to solve this issue.