| Introduction |  | |
Features | | |
How we tested | | |
Verdict |
Features
Sugar Suite is a Web browser-driven portal ... you log on, and away you go. There is a vast array of areas within the CRM portal, but you always start at the homepage.
This presents you with a summary of appointments, unread e-mails, open business opportunities, cases, leads, tasks, team notices, a calendar of events and a sales pipeline, as well as the last few resources you accessed when you were last logged on. Of course, this content is completely customisable depending on who's accessing it (salespeople wouldn't have bug fixes assigned to them, and likewise for support technicians and sales pipelines). There's also a list of shortcuts to quick tasks such as creating a contact, account or quote, entering a business card or scheduling a meeting, call or task.
As with any true portal, all of these pockets of information and quick tasks are linked to other areas, which are accessed by a menu system that runs across the top of the Web page and offers tabbed browsing through the pages available to the user. The portal itself is completely customisable to the individual, so users can remove tabs which don't interest them, move more pertinent tabs further up the list and so on.
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| [Click to enlarge] Tabbed menus keep all the pages at your fingertips. |
A quick scan across the menu reveals the following resources -- Calendar, Activities, Contacts, Accounts, Leads, Opportunities, Cases, Bug Tracker, Documents, Emails, Campaigns, Projects, RSS and Dashboard. In the Professional version, Quotes, Products, Reports and Forecasts are also available, as well as an access control function allowing particular users like franchisees, regional companies or contractors to only access a part of the system, and an underlying workflow engine, allowing for WHEN and IF situational management. Phew -- comprehensive or what?
Concept and ideology
Before we get into the technical features of Sugar Suite, it's worth looking at the ideology behind the product, and what it has been designed to achieve.
Sugar Suite has been designed primarily as a business' repository of customer information. This information is then served to and manipulated by various teams throughout the company, who act as the company's representatives (in differing capacities) to the customer.
It serves salespeople by providing information on customer contact details -- who is in which position, who's the best person to talk to about a particular product and so on. E-mails and details of phone conversations can be stored in the application, allowing salespeople to keep track of what has been discussed with whom, and more importantly, what has been promised and by when. It keeps the sales teams constantly aware of their current and future obligations.
For marketing teams, Sugar Suite offers detailed customer information which allows marketing to target its campaigns accordingly. User data can be filtered based on any known attribute -- industry type, location, company size and so on. Draft communications can then be created using templates within Sugar Suite, and exported via a mail merge, customised for the individual recipients and sent in either electronic or hard copy.
Then there's that essential component of customer relations -- post-sales support. This isn't simply helpdesk operators troubleshooting product faults, although this facility is strongly supported. Sugar Suite features call logging procedures, allowing support staff to document problems as they arise. All problems reported by the customer are available so support personnel have the client's full history. It also links back to sales, so that support teams know precisely what products a customer has purchased, and when and what the support/maintenance agreements are. The sales teams will also be aware of which products the customer has requested post-sales support for.
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| [Click to enlarge] Tabbed menus keep all pages at your fingertips. |
Finally, there's customer self-service. Enabling customers to interact directly with the company and either view or modify their accounts is a great tool (think of ISPs letting you view your usage and change your account type online). Sugar Suite integrates with all the popular Web servers to allow customers to do just that. They can log on and get an up-to-date indication of their business activities.
In spite of its capacity for large amounts of [input] data, Sugar Suite isn't designed for companies which have high volume data activity -- environments where lots of information is entered very quickly, such as a call centre. Its main focus is to enable disparate groups to constantly update relevant information, provide a framework within which that information is meaningful, and streamline workflow for tasks requiring the data.
| Introduction | | |
Features | | |
How we tested | | |
Verdict |
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Sugar CRM is a great product for small to medium companies looking for an entry level customer management tool.
We have a number of startup and small to medium businesses where we have implemented Sugar CRM and it is now handling all customer relationships.
The installation is easy, normally deployed on a low end Linux server.
We simply 're-skin' the web based application so the product looks and feels just like their other systems displaying company logos and colours.
Good review! Sugar is a great product which we also run across our businesses.