Paramantra was formed in Greater Boston (US) in March 2008, to build and develop software solutions to address unmet customer engagement needs of businesses. Tathagat Jaruhar, the founder, had nearly two decades of experience in the customer relationship management (CRM) space, having worked with a US-based helpdesk software publisher prior to this. He had also worked for two enterprise application companies before that – Oracle and SAP.
In these roles, Jaruhar had gained experience in not only being a part of but also building and managing cross-functional, multicultural and high- performing mission-critical teams. Having worked in the CRM domain, he saw a difference in how users perceived their CRM in comparison to management team perception at the time of implementing a CRM.
“A vast majority of CRM software providers back then and even now, require users to update information about customer interactions manually,” explains Jaruhar, adding that the business product name reflects upon the company’s pursuit to help its users achieve and go beyond their objectives and mantra of customer success. Paramantra means: para + mantra – beyond mantra. A platform to plan, execute, go above and beyond the mantra for customer success, has been serving the CRM system needs of clients for over 12 years, with a retention rate of over 97 per cent.
“Manually updating customer records is a tedious and error-prone process,” explains Jaruhar. “Paramantra was formed with the aim to architect a solution, where users needed to fill the least information manually and management teams get good data to support customer and business analysis”.
Over the last decade, Paramantra has developed advanced SaaS-based software, which is sold and serviced directly by their team of experts. They serve the sales, service/support and request management needs of varied industry verticals including real estate, finance, tours and travels, manufacturing, retail, hospitality, and more. Paramantra’s R&D team, service delivery team, and support teams have direct access to customers’ requirements and have a common line of organisational reporting, which allows flexibility in achieving customer success.
“With average employee tenure of over six years, our customers have achieved project rollouts in less than three business days,” says Jaruhar. “Gartner, Forrester, Grail and other renowned market research agencies have publicly shared the success ratios of CRM implementations. These market reports claim that, globally, 40-63 per cent of CRM implementations fail to meet their stated objectives.”
“While analysts cite various reasons to explain this high failure rate, we at Paramantra have developed processes that allay your concerns about implementation failures,” discloses Jaruhar. “Part of this involves understanding and perfecting the cause and effect between customer adoption and organisational revenue, which has helped us achieve 100 per cent success in implementation rates. We pursue novel methods of promotion and distribution in an effort to commercialise the technological advances in our domain. A completely revenue-driven business model and annuity-based customer retention are the primary reasons behind our endurance.”
Paramantra’s first client was a marketing research company that wanted a solution for a Fortune 500 customer. “The solution was sold without Paramantra branding, but the company started its operations with a cheque of $6,000 as an advance, even without a company name,” says Jaruhar.
Paramantra is a cloud-based CRM that is built, sold, managed, and serviced directly. In the CRM industry, the big four solution providers sell, service, and consult via large channel partner networks (indirectly). Paramantra’s revenues are generated by subscription fees that the customer pays for licensed usage.
Before Covid-19, Paramantra was focussed on increasing its customer base by deploying regional offices across India. It has an on-ground presence in Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Chennai, and Hyderabad and plans to open its sixth office in Pune.
“At one end, our customers include those who make the world’s most complex and critical equipment for NASA while, at the other end of the spectrum, are those who make their city’s most loved cakes,” contends Jaruhar. “Our customers also include multibillion dollar, centuries-old, German manufacturers, Indian retailers that are household names, as well as hyper-local city clinics”.
Crossroads for CRM industry
Prior to the pandemic, companies with smaller customer-facing teams thought technology and automation were for big companies – but now they are at the forefront, embracing this change to rapidly digitise their customer-facing functions.
“In the last six months, there were several such unlikely heroes, from a 100-year-old traditional hospital in Lucknow, an agri-business in Ahmednagar, a bakery in Bhubaneswar, to a college in Madhya Pradesh – we have implemented our solutions at companies we never knew would be able to invest in a CRM,” says Jaruhar. “We are looking at continuing its triple-digit (y-o-y) recurring revenue growth trajectory of the past two years. Almost 90 per cent of this growth is being driven by India at this time. The company aims at crossing $2 million in annual recurring revenue this year.”