Digital transformation is a popular buzz phrase. But, what does it mean and how does it fit into your business?

There are many definitions floating around the Internet. This one from the analyst firm the Altimeter Group is good: “the realignment of, or new investment in, technology and business models to more effectively engage digital customers at every touchpoint in the customer experience lifecycle.” But I would extend it by saying it’s about engaging ALL customers — through both digital and human touchpoints.

Many organizations today are undertaking broad initiatives to transform how they engage with their customers. Whether this is classified as a digital transformation, a customer engagement transformation, a business transformation, or something else, a common theme is holistically incorporating capabilities such as social, mobile, data analytics, marketing automation and CRM into a complete solution for customer engagement along the entire customer journey.

The role of CRM in digital transformation

Digital transformation spans more than just CRM, but CRM should be a key component of digital transformation for the following reasons:

The CRM is a central hub for information about customers – a critical data source for human and digital touchpoints during customer engagement.
Almost all organizations still need human touchpoints such as sales reps, customer success managers, customer service agents, etc. Even as organizations increasingly adopt intelligent digital capabilities like marketing automation and social media monitoring and outreach, at the point in the customer journey where that customer interacts with a human, it’s important that the human can navigate the CRM system to better connect with the customer. In this scenario it’s also critically important that the CRM system can tie into and both inform, and be informed by, the other digital systems and channels.
CRM requirements in the digital transformation era

To make your CRM a centerpiece of your digital transformation, it must easily integrate into other customer engagement tools so that the CRM user is presented with all the relevant information he or she needs to know about a customer, even if that information resides outside of the CRM (and much of it will). For example, can a call center rep see previous digital marketing interactions, social media comments, and even in-store / in branch activity, quickly and easily inside the CRM? From the CRM, can they then initiate other processes like a return process, check on the status of an order in the order management system, even add the contact to an existing marketing automation program? Can a sales rep be fully informed about all the prospect’s previous digital interactions? Are analytics quickly and easily measured in the CRM to provide “next best actions” or upsell recommendations, easily and quickly to the sales or contact center rep?

Why is Sugar the best CRM for Digital Transformation?

Here’s how Sugar is uniquely positioned to meet these needs:

Innovation Empowering the Individual

A Customizable CRM platform

Greatest business value

For all your SugarCRM needs contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

Read the full article here – https://blog.sugarcrm.com/2016/03/08/sugarcrm-is-the-platform-to-support-your-digital-transformation/

Following its acquisition of Stitch last year, SugarCRM — a CRM competitor to Salesforce — has picked up another startup to enhance the arsenal of intelligent sales tools that it provides to its customers. The company has acquired Contastic, a startup based out of Mountain View that built a platform based around natural language processing technology to analyse communications between sales people and their contacts, and help them keep up those relationships.

Contastic had built a platform that draws on data sources like email, LinkedIn and Salesforce essentially to create a composite picture both of the target contact, and a sales person’s existing relationship with that person, then also providing extra content — suggestions of relevant news stories — to help start up conversations with those people.

Contastic competed with and sat alongside a number of other tools on the market that are also in the general category of predictive sales like Clari, 6sense, InsideSales and more. This — combined with the fact that a lot of CRM is consolidating around specific platform players like SugarCRM, Salesforce and Oracle; and that there is something of a funding squeeze for some startups — will mean that we are likely to see more M&A activity, says Augustin.

“There is a lot of interesting tech that we are working on around helping people be a lot more connected and establish business relationships, but a lot of those feel like they are features that need to hook into a broader system,” he said. “We have a very broad platform that extends the whole cuxtomer lifecycle, and whether you are talking about a Contastic or Stitch it’s hard to monetise them separately. We are going to remain acquisitive. Let’s see what others in the space plan to do.”

What this will also help SugarCRM do is strengthen its own product while it too waits for its next “liquidity event.” The company’s most recent round of new funding was a $40 million Series F i 2013 — made at the time as the company was anticipating an IPO.

Times, for sure, have changed, but Augustin says SugarCRM — which started as an open source project but has since stopped updating its open source edition in favor of a more commercial model — is in a strong position.

For all your SugarCRM needs, contact InnoventCRM today, your Sydney based CRM experts on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

Read the full article here – http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/02/sugarcrm-acquires-contastic-for-natural-language-based-predictive-sales-tools/

As a precursor to their annual Salesforce Automation (SFA) Magic Quadrant, several Gartner analysts ran a survey polling key decision makers at enterprises around the world about what they look for in an ideal SFA/CRM system. The results were published on Gartner’s site (note: subscription required) this week, and the results are not surprising.

Well, not surprising to us over here at SugarCRM. That is because the key areas that IT decision makers saw as important focus areas are the exact areas where we have built out the Sugar product and platform the most over the past few years.

So, according to the survey, what is most valued by IT leaders?

Intuitive Mobile Solutions
Mastery of Core Functionality
Ease of Integration

On the topic of mobility – I think we as an industry are finally coming to understand that mobile CRM does not mean “shrinking a CRM system down to a phone screen UI.” Rather, we are building more device and purpose-driven applications of CRM – and it is great that IT Decision makers also get this, meaning they are looking to optimize the real-life mobile usage scenarios customer-facing employees require every day. I am excited about the direction our mobile team is going, and we will have lots of cool announcements as 2016 unfolds.

When it comes to “core functionality” – we at SugarCRM have seen more and more companies select Sugar not by our “latest and greatest” or “edge functionality” but rather by Sugar providing absolutely mature and intuitive core SFA features on top of the most solid, extensible and scalable platform. In today’s world, IT leaders know they can develop and build features on a platform, but a solid and well-designed user experience must be there in order to start off on the right foot.

While Integration has certainly come a long way in the age of the cloud, we often forget than many of the large enterprises out there are still stifled by legacy applications. These products have older, proprietary back ends – making integration challenging. Sugar offers a wider range of integration options making it easier to integrate legacy enterprise applications with Sugar than with other CRM systems out there. And as integration becomes easier and easier, we are seeing even more innovative combinations of enterprise and Web data merged with Sugar data to create more highly informed users.

Again, these survey results are not surprising when you consider where we are at in terms of CRM trends. Large enterprises are moving away from legacy systems and the large giant incumbent software vendors, and midsize companies are entering the “strategic” phase of their CRM journeys. It all combines for what we see as an exciting era in CRM history, one that bodes very well for SugarCRM and our vision for the market.

For all your SugarCRM needs contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

Read the full article here – https://blog.sugarcrm.com/2016/02/19/gartner-survey-reveals-it-decision-makers-agree-with-sugar-vision/

SugarCRM is thrilled to be the recipient of an IBM Beacon Award in the Outstanding Commerce solution category.

Winners in the IBM Beacon Awards, a part of IBM’s business partner recognition program, are selected by a panel of expert judges consisting of IBM executives, industry analysts and members of the press. IBM’s Beacon Awards recognize Business Partners who have demonstrated business excellence in delivering IBM-based solutions to clients around the world to drive transformation and business growth.

SugarCRM won for the integrated “IBM Marketing Cloud and SugarCRM” solution. This solution empowers the delivery of exceptional experiences for customers across the buyer journey by leveraging customer data, providing analytical insights and automating relevant cross-channel interactions. The solution 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.

Multiple customers, including Rodobens in Brazil, and Henry Wurst Inc., have already chosen to deploy this solution. You can read more about their usage here

For all your SugarCRM needs contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

Read the full article here – https://blog.sugarcrm.com/2016/02/17/sugarcrm-wins-ibm-beacon-award/

(Editor’s note: The following blog post originally appeared on IBM’s commerce blog on February 4, 2016)

In the digital world, customer journeys have become much more complicated than they used to be. Customers may research a product or service online or via social media, visit the vendor website, or react to paid or owned media. They may talk to a vendor and/or its competitors at a tradeshow, or they might get around to talking to a vendor’s sales or call center reps. Many of these touchpoints in the complex journey involve separate technology solutions: a web personalization tool, a social media tool, a campaign management tool, or a CRM system being used by sales and call centers.

CRM can be an invaluable tool for designing, optimizing and coordinating the entire customer experience across all of these touchpoints. Although, what’s needed is a way to more easily tie together all the events across the journey, regardless of the systems and technologies that drive the interactions. IBM’s Universal Behavior Exchange (UBX) facilitates seamless connectivity of customer identities and events across channels, apps, and data sources to make this integration far easier.

SugarCRM enables businesses to create extraordinary customer relationships with an innovative, flexible and affordable CRM solution. SugarCRM’s integration into IBM UBX makes it easier to connect with all the systems and applications that drive digital interactions with customers, keeping sales and service reps fully informed about other activities and events that their customer has experienced. With SugarCRM and the IBM UBX ecosystem, organizations can more easily manage customer experiences across the entire customer journey, regardless of which tools are used to manage individual touchpoints.

SugarCRM’s integration with IBM UBX makes it easier to understand and coordinate interactions across the entire customer journey.

https://youtu.be/HDzoFC4cBYI

For all your SugarCRM needs contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

Read the full article here – https://blog.sugarcrm.com/2016/02/04/ibm-sugarcrm/

Valuable insight by Michael Schneider

The CRM executive reflects on the company’s recent developments, plans for 2016, and the economy.

CRM is a rapidly moving industry, but from time to time, it can be nice to take a moment to reflect on its current state and what lies ahead. SugarCRM’s CEO Larry Augustin recently stopped by CRM magazine’s New York offices to chat about the company’s expansion and acquisitions, enhancements to the SugarCRM platform and marketplace, and improvements scheduled for the new year.

For Sugar, “the next wave of CRM is in helping individuals do their jobs automatically,” Augustin told CRM magazine. This means arming customer-facing professionals with tools that can import data into their systems so that they don’t have to, while enabling them to figure out their next moves.

“One of our views is that CRM needs to help a company manage the full customer lifecycle across the business,” Augustin added. “That means not just sales, but [also] marketing…customer service and support—all of those people and processes in a company interacting to help serve the customer.”

Click on the video below to view excerpts from the interview.

https://youtu.be/VJ25zN1GdXM

[The above video was produced by CRM magazine’s Editorial Director David Myron.]

For all your CRM needs contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

CUPERTINO, Calif. – January 14, 2016 – SugarCRM Inc., the company that enables businesses to create extraordinary customer relationships with the most innovative, flexible and affordable CRM solution in the market, announced today that TMC, a global, integrated media company, has named Sugar as a winner of the 2015 Customer Experience Innovation Award presented by TMC’s CUSTOMER magazine.

“Sugar is a platform that helps companies better understand and engage with customers so they can grow their business,” said Larry Augustin, CEO, SugarCRM. “This award reflects the success we’ve achieved in putting individual employees at the center of our CRM solution. This approach enables individual-to-individual connections between customers and employees and leads to faster, more consistent, and more personalized communication for a more seamless customer experience.”

SugarCRM was recognized by TMC because it is an innovative, flexible and affordable CRM. Organizations that take full advantage of Sugar utilize it as the hub of their entire organization, bringing together all customer data to deliver the right information to employees and customers at the right time. Sugar coordinates the actions of all customer-facing employees to deliver a seamless experience through the entire customer lifecycle. The Sugar platform offers an intuitive and customizable user experience that is consistent across the mobile and desktop interface.

“Congratulations to SugarCRM for receiving a 2015 Customer Experience Innovation Award. SugarCRM has been selected for enhancing the customer experience and improving business relationships,” said Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC. “We’re pleased to recognize this achievement.”

Contact Innovent today for all your SugarCRM needs on 1300 781 681

The new site offers a number of big improvements, all aimed at delivering the help you need as quickly as possible:

• Powerful Search : You will now see a search bar with dropdown menus where you can select your version, edition, and user type to receive focused search results. Results are filtered by these criteria to ensure you are being presented with the most relevant content possible. You can easily broaden your search my removing filters, and your selections will carry over to subsequent site visits.

• Simple Navigation : The grey navigation bar appears on all pages, below the search bar, allowing you to easily access all major areas of the site as well as providing quick access to training, the community, and the case portal. Once you’ve drilled into our content, the navigation menu on the left facilitates your movement within the page or to related content within a focused portion of the site.
  
• Documentation Hub : The Documentation tab displays all relevant user guides and other resources for your selected version and edition of Sugar. This serves as a centralized hub for learning about your specific Sugar instance as well as the appropriate mobile apps, plug-ins, and connectors.
• News & Updates : The home page now includes a news feed of community conversations, the support site’s most popular and useful content, and our most recently published or updated pages.
• Feedback : The bottom of every page allows you to rate a page’s usefulness and to provide text feedback about the page. We want to hear your opinions! Please note, the option to rate a page only shows for logged-in users.

• Mobile Viewing : Mobile-responsive design ensures you can access the support content you need no matter where you are – including on your phone, tablet, or other mobile device.

For all your SugarCRM needs contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au

Read the full article here – https://community.sugarcrm.com/community/news/blog/2016/01/11/launch-of-new-support-site

A major trend we’re seeing among Sugar customers and in the industry at large is a more enlightened take on CRM – one where businesses are going beyond automation or internal streamlining and embarking on fundamentally changing the way they interact with their customers from the time prospects start to learn about the company through deployment of their product or service. Because digital communication channels are at the center of the disruption, the term “digital transformation” has been used to describe this shift in business thinking. Gartner estimates that 50% of enterprises have a digital transformation strategy underway, but the concept of business transformation is vital to companies of all sizes.

Whether you are breathing new life into a global sales organization, revamping channels for customer service, or launching a seamless end-to-end customer journey management initiative – these projects must be done with an eye to customer experience. This is not the same as a simple migration to more modern technology. Businesses must embrace new user paradigms, channels of interaction and put themselves into their customers’ shoes to better understand and address customers at every stage. While they call it “digital transformation,” it really comes down to optimizing the digital and human touch points along the customer journey.

A flexible, modern CRM like Sugar is central to operationalizing the desired changes, both as a single source of truth for all customer information, and as a powerful platform to coordinate and enable all customer-facing individuals. We at SugarCRM, along with our ecosystem of partners, are eager to continue to work with you, our valued customers, to reimagine your business from the customer’s point of view, and engineer the changes needed to build extraordinary customer relationships.

Larry Augustin, SugarCRM CEO

For all your CRM needs, contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au. We will help you “Make Every Connection Count” in your business in 2016 and beyond