In an interview with Insights Success, Camille El Hage, Founder of Cirrus Shield, shares his insights and experiences over products and motto of the organization, along with the organization’s future goals in revolutionizing the CRM industry.
Below are the highlights of the interview conducted between Camille and Insights Success:
How do you diversify CRM solutions so that it will benefit your customers?
Cirrus Shield was conceived as an application platform as a service (aPaaS) on top of which we implemented various solutions, first of which is our flagship Cirrus Shield CRM. We also have a built-in library of applications and CRM verticals that could be installed in one click.
Within a single environment, small to medium businesses could therefore start with a CRM that is tailor built to their vertical industry and benefit from a whole set of ready-made applications that they can install in one click. And bigger companies leverage the power of Cirrus Shield to deliver business applications fast.
Give a detailed explanation regarding the Founder/CEO/Management’s influence towards the industry and the company?
I started getting interested in computers and programming at the age of 12 and used to develop software as a hobby. After graduating from the Lebanese American University in 2001, I began my career as a software engineer. I then worked as a CRM Consultant for a number of years before launching Cirrus Shield. In 2011, I was named as one of the 12 influencers of CRM in France, and in 2013, I was selected as one of the top 350 consultants out of 80,000 worldwide.
As a consultant I gained a lot of experience in deploying CRMs, both for small to medium businesses and for big groups. I had the opportunity to work in more than 15 countries and work on CRM deployments with more than 10,000 users deployed so far in my career.
Describe the experiences, achievements or lessons learnt that have shaped the journey of Cirrus Shield.
Building Cirrus Shield wasn’t easy; there was little literature on how you build such a solution. Our choice was to hire from the very beginning some of the best minds in the market and convince them of the vision we were trying to achieve.
Another challenge we had after launching our software onto the market was we had the chance to win a project with one of the leading financial companies in the world. Suddenly our solution was to be able to support thousands of users with millions of records.
Considering the rising number of CRM solutions providers, how does Cirrus Shield stand out from its competitors?
Although they are now coming in different colors and flavors, today’s CRMs are still a legacy of the past, with little capacity in adapting to specific user requirements. They also have a monolithic approach of conducting business and are therefore usually not adapted to specific verticals.
Cirrus Shield provides businesses with tailor made software that is plug and play. Users can select the CRM for their vertical and install it in one click. And for those who wish to adapt or extend their CRM, Cirrus Shield offers a set of visual tools that let users with no technical background customize their CRM or even build business applications with clicks.
There is also a marketplace where business solutions can be downloaded and installed in the users’ environments. So Cirrus Shield can also cater to HR, invoicing, project management, etc.
Where does Cirrus Shield see itself in the long run and/or what are its future goals?
There are a lot of things we would like to achieve in the long run, but those can be summarized in two categories:
- To our customers, we would like Cirrus Shield to be the software platform on which they run and grow their businesses.
- As a product, Cirrus Shield’s objective is to change how software will be used tomorrow, allowing users to build or customize their CRM or any business solution as they would play with a Lego™.
Give us a few testimonials of your clients that accurately highlight Cirrus Shield’s position in the market.
“With Cirrus Shield CRM connected to both our marketing and e-commerce platforms, we have been able to better understand our customers, improve customer segmentation and grow our sales.” – Charline Maillet, Web Marketing & CRM at Cheval Energy
“Deployed in less than a month, our self-service customer portal implemented with Cirrus Shield allows us to better meet our customers’ expectations, anywhere in the world.” – Laurent Joly, Vice President Worldwide Customer Care and Cloud Production, InfoVista
About the Company
Cirrus Shield lets companies of all sizes drive their sales, marketing and customer service. Cirrus Shield CRM offers a turnkey approach with industry-specific built-in solutions. Cirrus Shield Platform empowers users to create business applications with visual configuration tools. Our collaborative rapid application development and delivery environment fosters innovation and new ideas across the company.
Source: The 10 Most Disruptive CRM Solution Providers 2018
