Faced with the need to cut communication costs, more and more corporate users in India are adopting instant messaging tools. Srikanth R P checks out this trend, and what the future holds in this space

Pradeep Nair says users can enhance and enable real-time Web-based CRM and SCM applications using instant messaging tools

Walk into any corporate environment today and chances are if there are PCs with Internet connections, you will find applications like Yahoo or MSN Messenger open, and users furiously keying in messages. Wait a minute! These aren’t your normal shirkers, but many corporate users in India today actually use these instant messaging applications for business use, and not for personal gratification. Instant messaging (IM) as it is popularly known, has come a long way from the days when its usage was restricted to teenagers chatting away or exchanging gossip.

Unlike e-mail where users have to wait for the sender to respond, IM tools are helping business houses take decisions on the spot. The greatest advantage is the cost benefit especially in these times where businesses are looking at every possible way to cut down on costs. Communication costs (mainly long distance calls) constitute a huge part of the total cost scenario, and IM tools offer a great solution here.

Not surprisingly, market analysts estimate the use of instant messaging by corporates has grown by over 110 percent in the last year. A research report by Forrester predicts that by 2005, two-thirds of all corporate users of e-mail will use instant messaging. Also, as more and more business gets conducted by communication over IM tools, corporations are actively looking at the value of integrating IM tools with their business applications. Industry reports estimate one billion messages are sent each day and are rapidly challenging the phone market where 1.9 billion calls are placed each day.

The players

According to Vaitheeswaran, IM tools have enabled Fabmart to increase conversion of browsers to orders

The instant messaging scene is today host to a variety of players from biggies like IBM with its Lotus Sametime to start-ups like Geodesic and public messenger players like Yahoo who are now trying to elbow into the Indian corporate sector with customised IMs. Yahoo has already built customised IMs for the likes of corporates like BPL, B4U and NOW. It is a win-win situation for both Yahoo and the corporate. For instance, the customised IM which Yahoo built for BPL allows consumers to exchange instant messages with BPL’s marketing executives and also have queries answered related to product related information.

Says Deepak Chandani, country head, Yahoo India, “Usage of IMs in corporates can lead to more effective logistics management by minimising delays in communication and making possible online conferences with the entire distribution and marketing team. Our customised version of Messenger is being used very effectively for internal and external communication with vendors, supply chain logistics, and end customers.”

Strategies
While the popularity of IM has been undoubtedly been due to the fact that almost all the public IMs come for free, it is interesting to note the strategies of different players. IT giant IBM for instance is leveraging its enterprise expertise built over the years in bundling its IM solution, Lotus Sametime, to corporates.

Says Pradeep Nair, country manager, Lotus-IBM Software, “As we have experience in working with organisations across many industries, including financial services, law, government and high technology, we have been able to translate this experience into Lotus Sametime 2.5. With this solution, organisations can introduce improved extranet connectivity and enhanced control over meeting participation with new online meeting tools. The same solution can be extended to securely collaborate with customers, partners or suppliers. Organisations can thus deploy Lotus Sametime as a Web service to enhance and enable real-time Web-based customer relationship management and supply chain management applications.”

Kiran Kulkarni says IM tools can be a great hit in meeting the customer management needs of banks and e-commerce sites

Gausa LLC hopes to increase usage by bundling its IM solution free of cost with its Switchnotes Instant Editor, a data conferencing utility that allows two or more people to edit a document online instantly. Says Simmy Goswami, president, Gausa LLC, “We see great potential in the usage of IM solutions in sectors like health, education, legal, financial institutions, and of course, customer care.” Such is the potential that Goswami is confident of selling around 5,000 licenses in the first year itself.

It is also interesting to note the success of Geodesic Information Systems which betted big on its interoperable messenger product christened ‘Mundu’. Currently, Mundu has a unique advantage over other competing brands as it is a messenger with compatibility with all the industry’s leading brands like AOL, MSN, ICQ and Yahoo. This killer product has already been licensed to the Indiatimes portal. With the core technology already in place, Geodesic hopes to provide in Mundu a brand that can fit the needs of businesses of all sizes. Says Pankaj Kumar, managing director, Geodesic, “Corporates have begun to realise the vast potential of instant messaging. Online meetings, enhanced wireless services and new forms of collaboration are just the start. Online auctions, e-commerce, knowledge management, CRM, inventory control and clearance and stock market activities are all potential applications that can be done with the help of instant messaging.”

Constant innovation is the name of the game and who knows this better than Yahoo. Yahoo for instance introduced Yahoo for SMS a facility that allows users to send and receive text messages from computers to cellular phones, a cellular phone to a computer, and from one cellular phone to another. For this service, Yahoo has tied up with various cellular operators throughout India. Yahoo was also the first one to launch a Webcam facility. The latest version of MSN Messenger, Yahoo’s biggest competitor in the IM space, also offers facilities for voice, video and telephony ideal for corporate users. Microsoft is playing the same game it did when it launched Internet Explorer it has integrated IM capability into Windows XP.

Other players like Odigo (now acquired by Comverse), pioneers of the first interoperable messenger, are focusing their energies on the mobile space, which analysts believe is still a virgin market. Says Alexander Diamandis, VP, Marketing, Odigo, “We see great potential in a new range of presence enabled services that can generate compelling revenues for telecom operators from increased data traffic, airtime and premium charges. Our instant messaging solution is an end-to-end service that allows a wireless carrier’s subscriber to readily initiate a variety of instant voice and text messaging services, while knowing the presence of the intended audience.”

Usage in India
The increasing trend of IM usage in corporates is seen by the fact that in India firms like LG Electronics, IBM, HLL, Infosys, PwC, Ernst & Young India, Dishnet DSL, Spectramind, B4U, BPL and NOW are all active users of instant messaging tools.

Says Tarun Satiya, head Knowledge Management Services group, Ernst & Young India, which uses Lotus Sametime for its IM needs, “In a knowledge-based industry, it makes sense to use IM tools extensively, especially when a company’s resources are located at different locations. Each and every group in E&Y India uses IM tools extensively. More than cost savings, we look at IM tools as a collaborative environment in which a lot of ideas can be tossed around and discussed. For instance, we have competency profiles in our database that a employee can access to get his or her queries solved.”

Lifesaver for e-commerce sites?
One of the biggest stumbling blocks for e-commerce taking off is the lack of personalisation that users want. For example, customer behaviour at e-commerce sites has always shown that shoppers often ditch an online purchase just before hitting the pay-now button, simply because they are unable to get an immediate answer to a simple question. Here, instant messaging can help e-commerce sites convert a hesitant customer into a potential sale.

Explains Kiran Kulkarni, director, Geodesic, “If you go to a site and like a product, you would obviously want to know more about it. And what better way to answer a customer’s queries than an instant messenger. The missing link in e-commerce sites can thus be addressed with the help of instant messaging tools.” The Mundu IM environment ensures queuing, transferring, escalation and auditing of partner, agent, employee, and customer interaction for time-sensitive communication of key industries. Kulkarni predicts that the product would be a great hit when deployed in banking applications. A bank could have an instant messenger operational and have queries answered instantly, cutting down on the time spent by customers over phone calls and at the bank itself. For banks and financial institutions worried about security issues, the Mundu IM offers SSL-based 128-bit encryption for authentication and messaging.

Many Indian e-commerce sites have already started to offer the benefits of instant messaging to their customers. Take the case of e-commerce site, Fabmart. The company introduced the concept of ‘live chat’ in its customer service section around a year back and the success of the concept has thrilled the company. Explains

K Vaitheeswaran, vice president-marketing, Fabmart.com, “We noticed that many customers who were browsing had some queries that they wanted answered before they placed their orders. These queries usually dealt with, ‘How do I search for a particular book or music album, how much do you charge for shipping of grocery orders, do you accept American Express cards?’ and so on. While we were responding to many such queries over e-mail, the delay was not helping customers retain their momentary impulses to buy at that time. Once we got in live chat, many such simple queries got answered on the spot and helped more customers place orders. In other words, it helped us increase conversions of browsers to orders.”

Fabmart also uses MSN Messenger across all its offices. Vaitheeswaran claims that this has brought down STD charges by over 50 percent since everyone has a MSN ID and wherever possible, this is used instead of a STD call. India’s rare product success story, Tally, offers customer support through an online chat facility too. Though e-commerce revenues are still minimal in India, it would be interesting to see if e-commerce vendors have the ability to scale up their IMs if they are bombarded with millions of requests, especially during holiday seasons like Christmas or Diwali.

Hindrances
While no one doubts the potential of instant messaging, there are doubts about the security aspect, which not many corporates have taken care of. While e-mail and telephone calls are relatively easy to monitor system administrators have relatively less control over public messengers which people in an organisation can use. In corporate environments, there is also a need for encryption of instant messages. In addition, if IM has to evolve as a one-stop communication facility for an organisation, incorporating features like voice and video, there will be the familiar problem of lack of bandwidth. Besides, unlike e-mail attachments where some vendors give the user a facility of a virus scan, there is no such feature for file transfers through IMs. But in spite of the hindrances, one thing is crystal clear an IM app is not a tool for kids anymore but a tool that’s part and parcel of the IT armoury of corporates.