Pradeep Bijur: The affordable housing market has in a way had an impact from the general mood of slowdown and high inflation that the economy has faced – these factors have actually helped create a boom for this segment. Luckily for us, we entered this market at the right time.

Three years ago a studio apartment would cost close to 10-12 lakhs whereas a 2 BHK apartment would cost around 20-30 lakhs. Today, while input costs have gone up, 2BHKs remain the most popular choice among our customers across India.

VBHC has been focusing on Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai and NCR for its growth. We currently have 2 projects in Bangalore, 1 in Chennai, 3 in Mumbai and 1 in Delhi. We are the only player in the affordable price range who have a PAN India presence.

Pradeep Bijur: Our business model is based on volume and scalability. Without enough projects working at the same time, the business model would not survive. Currently VBHC has 8 projects and by mid next year we would have 12-13 projects running simultaneously.

Scalability is one of the key drivers and systems have an important role to play. Driving internal efficiency is critical – it enables us to deliver projects on time, sell faster, collect faster, lower inventory levels and make affordable housing possible at a sustainable level.

Pradeep Bijur: The vision was to build a Customer Relationship Management system, but we've enhanced it to cover Sales, Finance, and Inventory. The focus was on customer experience – for us, affordability does not mean compromise.

We had a CRM module in our existing ERP, but it was fairly cryptic and complex, acting more as a back office system. We wanted to keep the customer as our focus and build an ecosystem around them – from the time they walk into the model house as a prospect to when they purchase a home.

We needed a system that was flexible enough to adapt to changes in business logic and function, acting as a computation engine for us. Hence we decided to go ahead with Salesforce.com.

Pradeep Bijur: At VBHC, all business processes from Call Centre, Sales team, Inventory, CRM team to Finance are part of the Salesforce.com system. The system interfaces with each department at different times, and data is visible to different teams depending on the activity.

For example, the Call Centre team connects with customers at the prospecting stage. We capture Customer Visit experience, and once the prospect books a flat, all documentation and point of sale experience is recorded. The inventory is real-time, and once an apartment is sold, handover is done to the CRM team for booking and welcome calls.

The entire payment schedules, collection system, and back office are built within Salesforce.com – it's not just a front end but also a back office computational system. Today we can add a new project within 15 days in Salesforce.com, whereas our ERP would take around 2 months.

Pradeep Bijur: Improving Customer Service Excellence was our target, and we've achieved remarkable results across multiple areas. The customer experience has transformed completely, and our internal efficiency has improved dramatically.