Aug 18, 2021

Balaji Ramachandran: Creative Leader Making an impact with Digital Transformation Solutions

Hundreds of people leave their marks on the digital transformation industry, from executives to engineers. Some, however, leave a much bigger mark and truly shape what is to come by creating innovative, customized technology-based solutions that will take customer service, CRM and CX to the next level.

Balaji Ramachandran (Bala) leads this charge, redefining terms in the digital transformation industry and creating new benchmarks in the sector. He is the Founder and CEO of SoftClouds, a leading CX solutions provider based in San Diego, California. Bala has everything necessary to be a big player in the digital transformation industry: a real enthusiasm for future customer experiences, passion for cloud technology, and years of experience.

Bala’s Entrepreneurial Journey

Bala has been passionate about customer experience-driven solutions/applications and the automotive industry since he was a kid. Bala started his career in 1993 at the Electronic Data Processing (EDP) department of India’s largest automotive dealership and services company TVS and later moved to the second-largest commercial vehicle manufacturer, Ashok Leyland. His focus was on sales and service automation, inventory management for parts, and scheduling systems to solve service and customer service problems.

Later, Bala moved to the United States and worked as a technology consultant for several major management consulting companies. Bala jokes that, as a consultant, he learned less about how-to and more about how NOT to do CRM implementations. He witnessed projects consistently fail due to high prices, ill-advised services, and poor software and business knowledge. That was when he decided to start a company that would do things right.

In 2005, recognizing the emerging trends in digital transformation, CRM, and Cloud, Bala started SoftClouds to address and implement Quality CRM Solutions. Bala picked the Automotive Industry as a break-thru ground for his innovation and passion for customer experience solutions. That has transformed his clientele of top automotive OEMs with CX solutions and set them future-ready. Bala has been the man in charge of making SoftClouds respected throughout the automotive industry and figuring out which cloud and CX solutions best fit the needs of OEMs stuck with on-premise legacy CRM systems.

Those who had the chance to work with Bala say that he always seems to have something up his sleeve, and he always knows how to fix even the most challenging CRM problems for his OEM clients.Bala was heavily inspired by software pioneer Thomas Siebel. At SoftClouds, Bala started with developing solutions to improve the Siebel CRM systems for major enterprises. Bala was instrumental in progressing the CRM industry to the cloud with cloud and hybrid CRM solutions.

Bala’s Attitude – Leave No Stone Unturned

Bala wanted SoftClouds to capitalize on the need for customized CRM software but faced numerous challenges on its inception. The biggest one was finding a way to prove the brand and its capabilities against major competitors, all without an established customer base.

However, Bala showed clients that a passionate boutique company with a high-quality mindset, better architects/solution providers like SoftClouds can provide a much better-tailored solution for a considerably lower cost. Sheer dedication and smart work took those promises and turned them into actual, demonstrable results.

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