A popular argument for deploying SaaS software is that it “just works.” It is simple for users to get started and use everyday without burdening the IT department. This argument has merit. The cloud has put the power in the hands of the user and minimized the need for IT to troubleshoot software issues. Instead, users can simply open up a browser and be productive.

However, that doesn’t mean technical concerns have been eliminated, they are simply hidden below the surface. SaaS customers need to understand the technical details of service they are using, especially when it comes to mission critical business applications like a CRM.

There are three major areas that can affect your business – maintenance, software upgrades and outages:

• When is routine maintenance scheduled and how long will the system be down during that period?
• How frequently are software upgrades made?
• How will the upgrades affect how the application looks, and relatedly, how much of learning curve will there be to understand product updates?

Think about the consumer services like Facebook and Twitter that you are used to using everyday. There is an adjustment period when even a minor tweak to the service changes “the look and feel.”

Now, imagine coming into work on a Monday morning – and the tools you use to do your job are suddenly barely recognizable due to a major product upgrade? How would that affect your productivity for the short term? Or, imagine as a manager of dozens of sales reps, you get the message that you need to immediately begin training on a new CRM because the old system is “going away.” What if this happens near the end of the quarter?

The IT department is responsible for maintenance and upgrades for software they deploy, and are usually responsible to plan for changes. But regular employees, and entire companies can be negatively impacted by changes both expected and unexpected.

When you rely on software applications to run critical parts of your business, any downtime is costly. The inability to access data, reach and respond to customers, or close deals equates to lost revenue or other hard costs. Research firm Gartner estimates that an hour of downtime for a critical system costs a company $42,000 on average.

And, if you are leaning toward the argument, “an outage is so rare, it won’t happen to me.” SaaS services delivered via the cloud are susceptible to outages. Just last month, an Amazon Web Services data center went down, taking access to Netflix, Reddit and Nest with it.

Now, think about what happens if your sales automation or customer support system goes down. You can probably tolerate a few minutes of downtime, but if it last hours or even a full day, it will dramatically affect the bottom line.

If you unexpectedly, or even with some warning, lose access to your systems – rebuilding that same system with another software product takes time and lots of energy. Costs include:

•      Purchase of replacement software
•      Staff or consultants to replicate customizations in the new system
•      Staff learning curve and training costs
•      Potential legal costs for re-acquiring data

All of these costs are significant. They can hinder operations at the largest of organizations, and could be catastrophic for smaller businesses. Thus, it is of utmost importance to ensure you have access to your data and system in light of any type of disaster or unforeseen “outage” of your SaaS applications.

By choosing a SaaS vendor with multiple deployment options, open software so the data can “live on”, and a solid business continuity plan – you can deploy cloud and SaaS apps with the highest level of confidence.

At InnoventCRM we believe the flexibility of SugarCRM as a SaaS system or with the ability to host on your own servers/environment, gives you the business owner the power and flexibility you need. Contact us today for a free consultation to better understand your specific business CRM needs – 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

Full article – http://blog.sugarcrm.com/2015/10/21/thinking-about-saas-risks-part-3/

Your CRM has probably stored gigantic amounts of data. The question is, are all of those data really accurate? A lot of companies are simply gathering too much data without having any quality control procedures. Data integrity is an issue that affects 90 percent of businesses resulting in a major bottom line impact. Instead of adding problems to your big data, here are a few tips and best practices to improve your data quality in CRM records.

Deduplication of Data

A sure way to avoid bad data quality is data deduplication. There are a few automated systems that can scour your data to check for duplicate records, which may happen due to error in spelling, siloed data collection methods, or lacking of automated duplication checks. A few open source CRM systems such as SugarCRM can also be customized to achieve this. There are also 3rd party addons that can be installed on top of your existing CRM to have achieve functionality. Your staff will be more productive if they have all the information that they need.

Standardize Data Collected

Another way to stop data duplication at its source is through standardizing the data collection method. Ideally, the way sales and marketing collects information is based on the customer journey, such as starting out with an email address and moving up to a phone number when the customer is almost ready to make a purchase decision. You also want to standardize state and country abbreviations, number systems and other data that could easily lead to duplication. With standardized data, you prioritize the data collected to the most important, and avoid clogging your CRM with information that doesn’t do anything to improve your customer relationship.

Examine Data Collection Process

Are there issues with your data collection process that make it easy to introduce faulty data in the system? It’s easy to introduce duplicate records and other extraneous data if you have multiple applications using a central database that sync at different times. If you have CRM records going into your system from multiple sales and marketing staff who aren’t working with the most up-to-date version of records, you’re going to end up getting a lot of dirty data added to the system. Reducing channel conflict, especially when you’re using multiple tools, goes a long way toward cutting down on this faulty information

Run Data Quality Initiatives Frequently

Data quality control is not a “set it and forget it” process, as data degrades at the rate of 3 percent per month, according to Televox. Even something as simple as an address quickly falls out of date, as 20 to 30 percent of people move per year. Work your data quality initiatives on a regular basis, preferably alongside other preventative maintenance measures run within your organization.

Your CRM data is incredibly valuable to your company, but only if you take the time to maximize its quality. Bad data can work its way into your records through many sources, from a lack of standardization to extraneous data collected that doesn’t truly pertain to your sales and marketing process. You’ll save your sales and marketing department a lot of time and resources with clean data.

For all your SugarCRM needs contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au. We help you to make “Every Connection Count” in your business!

Sources:

http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/how-to-improve-the-data-quality-of-crm-records-69748

http://blogs.forrester.com/michele_goetz/14-11-26-when_crm_fails_on_customer_information

https://www.edq.com/data-quality-infographics/state-of-data-quality/

http://www.televox.com/database-management/organizations-continue-to-be-challenged-by-inaccurate-records/

In a world that’s increasingly regulated, a well-designed and tightly-integrated CRM is imperative to an organization’s compliance efforts. In the United States, regulated industries with strict mandates like financial services, healthcare, and insurance are often finding that “out of the box” cloud-based CRM systems don’t comply with regulatory requirements.

For example, financial services companies simply cannot tolerate unplanned or provider-planned downtime. Healthcare organizations must adhere to strict HIPAA compliance requirements regarding patient data.

On top of regulatory compliance, outside the United States, many countries have significantly more strict rules around the gathering and storage of customer data. After the Edward Snowden revelations, cloud-based SaaS CRM apps can also bring about regulatory compliance challenges. Some countries now prohibit hosting data on U.S. servers, or require that data is stored within national boundaries. In many cases, the most desirable solution for multinational corporations or companies in highly regulated industries is to deploy servers on-premise. It’s the best way to maintain security and control, and to ensure regulatory compliance.

If companies in these regions and industries fail to comply with these mandates the penalties can be burdensome, or even disastrous. Being out of compliance in some regions or industries is an issue of breaking the law, and strict financial penalties for noncompliance can be crippling. The stakes are high. In 2014, USA and European banks paid nearly $65 million in fines for an array of violations.

Many SaaS and cloud providers will skirt the issue of data location and ownership with complex data key encryption. The customer data is actually stored in a data center in another country, but cannot be accessed without an encryption key stored locally. While encrypting data is an important security measure, it does not achieve compliance. Simply put, if the data is not in the region or country where the customers reside – compliance and control issues can still arise.

So, if your business is in a closely regulated industry, you need to know whether the CRM system you are considering supports these legal requirements. Additionally, if your business operates globally, or in countries with strict data laws, it is important to ask the right questions before choosing a CRM provider. So what are those questions? We’ve compiled a list. Be sure to get answers to these questions – in writing:

•      Can you decide where data is stored?
•      How can you be sure your data is being stored in your region? In your country?
•      Does the vendor offer on-premise deployment or are they cloud only?
•      How often can you export your data?
•      Can data be exported in multiple formats?
•      Can ALL of the system data be retrieved at any time? Or can you export only the database?
•      What about unstructured data such as activity streams, call records and other system metadata?
•      Is the data always “yours” and not owned by the vendor?
•      How does the vendor guarantee access to your data in the event of or business discontinuity?

If the potential vendor cannot answer these questions (and more important “put it in writing” as part of their SLA) you may want to re-think your choice.

At SugarCRM we have customers in more than 120 countries. We realize companies around the world are subject to many different laws and regulations. Legal requirements in one country or industry may be inconsistent with legal requirements applicable elsewhere. Hence, we offer a multi-tenant cloud service, a private instance in the cloud, and also allow customers to deploy on-premise on their own servers. This gives customers a level of control they can’t achieve in a proprietary SaaS-only model where their data is locked up in one vendor’s data silo. A flexible deployment approach allows our customers to more easily comply with international data security and privacy laws.

Contact InnoventCRM today for all your SugarCRM needs – 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

In case you haven’t heard, the old school thinking that customers are a commodity that can be managed is long passed its expiration date.

Nowadays, customers have the power. The rise of mobile and social networking means they are always connected and can find (and distribute) information in seconds.

As we discussed in a recent podcast, customer engagement is the new normal. To keep up in this new world, the most successful businesses focus on customer engagement by providing consistent, personalized experiences that reach customers just as they need them.

In layman’s terms, customer engagement means you have the eyes and ears of the customer. And, the customer is interested in interacting with you. Whether it be a proactive email reminding a customer about a renewal, or a text message promoting a special offer, customer engagement takes many forms.

One of the biggest obstacles to the customer engagement process is departmental silos.  Too often, different departments engage with the customer with different tools. The marketing department might use marketing automation, the sales team a CRM, and customer support…well, a customer support tool. While these tools are critical, the result is that the data created and used in these systems simply stays in these systems. Other departments either never get access to this data, or get it in a format or at a time that does not help them when dealing directly with a customer. A recent case study about Sugar customer Bancvue by analyst firm Nucleus Research takes a closer look at the benefits of moving from multiple data sources to the Sugar increased productivity, visibility, and customer data accuracy.

A solid CRM platform functions as the engine that harnesses customer data and drives and orchestrates customer engagement. Through its advanced workflows and ability to break down departmental silos, Sugar enables every employee in the organization to engage with the customer. By orchestrating conversations between employees and customers across the company, every employee understands where a customer is in their engagement with the company. From there, the individual can engage in a consistent, valuable and personalized way to provide an extraordinary experience for the customer.

With Sugar, organizations tie together the sales, marketing and post-sales support interactions to help break down silos of information and process, to better engage with the customer.

For all your SugarCRM needs and helping your business “Make Every Connection Count” contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

CRM Magazine Honors SugarCRM in Three Key Categories, Including Midmarket CRM Suite, Small Business CRM Suite and Sales Force Automation

CUPERTINO, CA — (Marketwired) — 09/23/15 — SugarCRM Inc., a company that enables businesses to create extraordinary customer relationships with the most innovative, flexible and affordable CRM solution in the market, today announced that the company has been honored with three industry awards from CRM Magazine, part of DestinationCRM.com. SugarCRM’s innovative vision of CRM was recognized with wins in three categories of the 2015 CRM Market Awards: Midmarket CRM Suite, Small Business CRM Suite and Sales Force Automation.

“At SugarCRM we’re leading a revolution in the way businesses engage with their customers. We help them understand the entire customer journey and empower every individual to take the actions needed to build extraordinary customer relationships,” said Larry Augustin, CEO, SugarCRM. “We’re very pleased that our vision for using CRM to connect individuals — i2i — has been recognized by leading CRM influencers, including CRM Magazine’s CRM Market Awards.”

The CRM Market Awards, awarded by the editors of CRM Magazine, highlight overall excellence and innovation in CRM. Nominees are evaluated based on company direction and vision, product functionality and customer satisfaction.

SugarCRM was recognized as a leader in the Midmarket CRM Suite, scoring well in functionality, customer satisfaction and cost. The company’s partnership with IBM was highlighted, with SugarCRM mentioned as a “good option for those wanting to customize their CRM.” The company was also named “One to Watch” in the Small Business CRM Suite and Sales Force Automation categories: “The SugarCRM platform has evolved considerably, with larger enterprises using the tool and finding rich functionality with low ownership costs.”

A complete listing of the 2015 CRM Market Awards winners can be found in the August 2015 issue of CRM Magazine.

For all your SugarCRM needs and helping your business “Make Every Connection Count” contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

Innovent Software the leaders in Custom Software Development solutions for medium and expanding businesses is pleased to announce the new addition to our teams in both Sydney as well Philippines!

We welcome Adam Yardley to head up our Customer Service & Support team. Adam comes with extensive customer service as well software application support experience. Adam has recently completed his studies in Software Development and is keen to take Innovent’s customer support offering to a whole new level.

In response to our growing client needs, Innovent will start 3 new developers in our Cebu & Manila operation centres today! These software development professionals bring 15 years of combined development experience to the Innovent Offshore team. We are excited for this capacity and skill increase, allowing us to serve you our clients that much more effectively.

For all your software Development needs, contact us today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventsoftware.com.au

We all know the importance of customer experience. Watermark Consulting published a great study on this showing that customer experience leaders outperform the S&P 500 by 35 points, and customer experience laggards post a return 45 points lower than the S&P 500.

Yet, many organizations struggle with providing a consistent and optimized experience for their customers because of:

– internal siloes between sales, marketing and service teams

– disconnects between digital touchpoints, such as digital marketing initiatives, and humantouchpoints, such as sales, service, and call center people

How many times can you think of cases where a prospect received an email or web offer, but then followed up with a salesperson who had no knowledge of that offer?

That’s why, SugarCRM is very excited to be working with IBM on the new IBM Marketing Cloud for SugarCRM. Multiple customers, including Rodobens in Brazil, and Henry Wurst Inc., have already chosen to deploy the newly released offering, which integrates Sugar for customer relationship management, and IBM Marketing Cloud built on Silverpop Engage, for marketing automation.

“We’re pleased to see how well this solution is being received by our customers,” said Larry Augustin, SugarCRM CEO. “IBM Marketing Cloud and Sugar have immediately resonated with clients who are looking to improve customer engagement and business performance. Together, Sugar and IBM Marketing Cloud enhance customer relationships while making marketing more efficient, sales more productive and service more satisfying.”

IBM Marketing Cloud and SugarCRM empower the delivery of exceptional experiences for customers across the buyer journey by leveraging customer data, providing analytical insights and automating relevant cross-channel interactions.

Integration with Sugar customer relationship management software provides:

• Automatic Customer Data Sync: Automatic data synchronization between Sugar and IBM Marketing Cloud delivers a complete view of customer activity across all departments and functions, and eliminates data duplication and inconsistencies.
• Customized Alerts: Alerts can be set to inform key stakeholders in any department when a customer reaches a certain score or rank. Scoring models can be built based on a broad range of behaviors.
• Contact Insight: Enables users across Sales, Marketing and Service to open and track all interactions with customers and prospects. Sales personnel can add contacts in the CRM system and trigger automatic inclusion in marketing programs.
• IBM Marketing Cloud emails sent directly from Sugar: Sales teams can customize pre-configured email templates and use them to communicate personally with their customers and prospects.

“At IBM, we’re committed to delivering exceptional experiences for customers across the entire buyer journey,” said John Mesberg, General Manager, Offering Management and Strategy, IBM Commerce. “Our integration with Sugar enables us to tap a rich store of customer data that includes all touchpoints – both human and digital. This comprehensive view makes for better decisions and more meaningful interactions at every step. We’re very pleased at the added value this integration delivers to our users.”

Contact InnoventCRM today to learn more about how “Making Every Connection Count” can revolutionise your business – 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

From http://blog.sugarcrm.com/2015/09/09/new-ibm-marketing-cloud-for-sugarcrm-provides-for-extraordinary-customer-experiences-across-sales-marketing-services-and-across-human-and-digital-touchpoints/

SugarCRM Inc., the company that enables businesses to create extraordinary customer relationships with the most innovative and affordable CRM solution in the market, announced today it has closed a successful second quarter, driven by strong enterprise sales. SugarCRM achieved 25 percent year-over-year growth in core annual recurring revenue (ARR). Growth was driven by increasing demand for Sugar among larger businesses worldwide, and supported by SugarCRM’s achievement of several major milestones in the second quarter, including the release of Sugar 7.6, a successful SugarCon event, the announcement of a key partnership with Infosys, and placement as a “Visionary” in Gartner’s 2015 Sales Force Automation Magic Quadrant.

Strong Up-Market Traction
SugarCRM’s impressive 25 percent year-over-year growth in core ARR was marked by growing demand for Sugar among larger businesses. In the second quarter, the company saw:

• 175 percent year-over-year growth in the number of seats per new customer
• 164 percent year-over-year growth in average new deal size
• 68 percent year-over-year growth in core ARR from accounts greater than $100,000
• 42 percent year-over-year growth in average ARR per customer

At InnoventCRM we continue to be recognized by SugarCRM as their SMB industry experts. Our experience with accounting software integration’s is second to none in the Australian & New Zealand market space. Contact us today to see how SugarCRM can help you “Make Every Connection Count” 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/2663415#ixzz3l1KyMQx1

Businesses don’t buy new enterprise-grade software solutions every day, so it should come as no surprise that many people have never been through the process. While buying new software can seem daunting, the company only needs to consider the following seven key factors before making a decision:

1. Goals
2. Functionality
3. Vendor selection
4. Deployment Strategy
5. Price
6. Scalability
7. Support options

At InnoventCRM we believe the choice is easy! Having worked with SugarCRM for in excess of 4 years, run it in our own business for that time also we believe you can’t go wrong with one of the leading CRM’s on the market! They are front runs in user interface experience, functionality, ease of use and integration with 3rd party business applications

Contact us InnoventCRM today to discuss your specific business needs and let us step your through our CRM Fast Start consulting package to discover the benefits of a CRM for your business – 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

To read the full article – http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/considerations-for-choosing-the-right-crm-system-for-your-business-68066

User adoption is a perennial challenge with CRM software deployments. Slow or low user adoption is a top cited contributing factor to CRM engagements that fail to achieve their objectives, or just fail outright.

In my experience, too many executives see the signs of slow adoption, but naively believe that the users will ultimately come around. In fact, the opposite is more likely. The longer it takes to achieve acceptance, the more probable the CRM software will fail to become sustainable.

I’d like to say that there are 2 or 3 things to do in order to achieve CRM adoption. But it’s just not that simple.

Here are 12 CRM best practices designed to mitigate CRM user adoption challenges.

1. Begin with strategy

2. Leverage a solid plan

3. Assemble the right team

4. Early and broad user participation

5. Voice of the customer

6. Process improvements

7. System design

8. User training

9. Consider change management

10. Measure adoption

11. Disciplined project management

12. Risk management

At InnoventCRM we do the heavy lifting for you in all of the above mission critical issues. Our CRM Fast Start consulting bundle is designed to address each of the above area’s and ensure all stakeholders in your business are on board and more than satisfied with the CRM system implementation

Contact us today to find out more on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

To read the full article – http://www.crmsearch.com/crm-user-adoption.php