Secutech builds deeper, richer customer relationships using Salesforce

In 2001, two young entrepreneurs fresh from engineering college embarked on a mission to make buildings smarter. What began as a 3-member startup in a 150 square foot office in Mumbai quickly grew into one of India’s leading master system integrators (MSIs) with 300+ personnel, six offices, 1,000+ completed projects, and 26 awards.

“Secutech helps buildings, cities, and industries accelerate their digital transformation through IoT,” says Aditya Prabhu, Co-founder and Group CEO at Secutech Automation India Pvt. Ltd. “We give customers a single view of their buildings’ performance by integrating data from various systems into our IoT platform. These insights help enhance a building’s efficiency, comfort, and security.”

Secutech’s clients include Fortune 500 giants like Google India, Adani, Reliance, Tata, and Cisco. The company’s work on the Cisco campus in Bangalore earned it the 2010 Buildy Award for the World’s Smartest Building.

“Since COVID-19, the demand for smart buildings has been driven by six key business imperatives—the need to protect occupant health and well-being, reduce operational costs, strengthen productivity and collaboration, improve sustainability, ensure security, and enable predictive building maintenance,” says Prabhu.

Secutech’s success lies not just in its technical ability to meet these needs, but also in its customer-first approach. 

“We strive to respond proactively to customer expectations at every stage—from capturing their vision, to managing their projects, to meeting service requirements,” says Prabhu. “Being this proactive requires complete customer data transparency. And that’s where Salesforce has made a difference. It gives us real-time intelligence to drive sales, projects, and services.”

Earlier, Secutech used different solutions for sales, service, and project management. But as the company matured and scaled, the limitations of these tools became apparent.

“Managing a sales cycle today is not just about looking at dashboards and pipelines—even spreadsheets can help you do that,” says Prabhu. “But a good CRM helps you use your data logically to drive positive business outcomes.”

Salesforce’s platform-based approach offered Secutech two advantages. The first was the potential to connect data across systems, thus improving data transparency. The second was the flexibility to customise Salesforce at a micro-level to meet evolving business needs. 

“With Salesforce, wherever we find a gap, we can create new functionalities or workflows—often in just a few hours,” says Prabhu.

Secutech implemented Salesforce Sales Cloud to digitise its entire sales journey—from campaign management to lead and opportunity management. Sales reps can now sell from anywhere because all the information and tools they need are just a click away. 

Salesforce also integrates with multiple third-party applications, pulling in and consolidating data into a single source of truth. All customer contacts, events, and alerts are now easily shared among teams on Slack through Salesforce. Similarly, customer emails sent via Gmail are automatically tracked on the solution. 

Since sales teams no longer have to switch between multiple systems to find data, their productivity has improved. They can also use customer data with Salesforce Campaign Management to create personalised marketing campaigns.

“Every opportunity we bid for is evaluated by a mix of decision-makers—so, the way we market to each of them also has to be different,” explains Prabhu. “With Salesforce, we have such in-depth visibility into each customer stakeholder that our messaging is highly targeted and personalised. 

“Despite not meeting customers face-to-face since COVID-19, we’ve been able to engage with them effectively through our digital campaigns. In fact, our brand recall value has improved by over 100%.”

Secutech is also improving partner engagement across a wide range of vendors. Earlier, each vendor had to be individually mailed for a cost proposal. But now, multiple vendors can be sent a common request for quote (RFQ) at one time. 

“What used to take us three hours to do can now be completed in 30 minutes,” notes Prabhu.

Secutech doesn’t just install smart building solutions—it also helps maintain and service them. 

Earlier, service processes were largely manual and siloed. Support tickets were created on spreadsheets. Field service data was scattered across texts, emails, and WhatsApp messages. Plus, a high number of manual touchpoints led to communication gaps between field service engineers and customers.

With Salesforce, these challenges have been solved. Service processes are now faster, more streamlined, and more efficient. Teams have full visibility into service contracts, SLAs, and product inventories. Support tickets are automatically generated and converted into work orders on Salesforce Service Cloud. 

Meanwhile, intelligent scheduling tools on Salesforce Field Service enable supervisors to automatically assign on-site jobs to the right service engineers based on skills and availability. Using the Field Service mobile app, engineers can manage jobs on the go with instant visibility into schedules, customer service history, and more.

Real-time data on engineer attendance and time spent on-site keeps customers updated on the progress of their service request, while enabling supervisors to evaluate engineers’ skills objectively.

Once a service request is fulfilled, the customer’s signature is digitally captured, and a report is provided on the spot. 

“No longer do we have to worry about paper-based service reports being lost or torn,” says Prabhu. “All the data is digitised on Salesforce, which makes it easier to audit complaints.”

Finally, real-time visibility into overdue customer complaints helps service teams close out issues faster. As a result, escalations have reduced by 22%-25%.

Secutech is now focused on achieving its vision of ‘Secutech 5.0’ – simplifying customers’ digital transformation journeys. 

“In the smart buildings market, we’re the only Indian SME competing on the same level as industry giants,” says Prabhu. “What sets us apart is the quality of customer experiences we deliver because our sales and services processes are so streamlined and customer-centric.”