August 28, 2009
August 28th, 2009
Superb customer service is key to make loyal advocates out of your customers.
In this issue:
1. Sugar CRM - Sugar Express, CRM for Small Business
2. Customer Service Week! Oct 5-9, 2009
4. CustomerServicePoint.com Info
Sugar CRM - Sugar Express, CRM for Small Business
by Erwin Steneker.
Customer relationship management systems are one of the best mechanisms for a small business to increase sales and customer satisfaction. They also boost employee productivity, as well as provide additional useful marketing and sales metrics. While traditionally only available for larger enterprises, CRM for Small Business is becoming increasingly more attainable, thus placing the same techniques and metrics used by large enterprises into the capable hands of individuals and small teams.
One such system, Sugar CRM, offers smaller and more budget-conscious organizations an excellent opportunity to leverage the power of CRM with minimal cost and effort. If your small business is evaluating CRM software, Sugar CRM's Sugar Express is worth consideration. Here is just some of what makes Sugar Express one of the best CRM solutions for you.
Running a small business is challenging, and the last thing you need is to add yet another complication in the name of increasing productivity. This is one area in which Sugar Express shines. While it is possible to download and install your own copy of Sugar CRM, Sugar Express is a completely managed solution. No need to worry about maintaining servers and databases, about applying routine updates or the many other tasks requiring a competent system administrator. This frees you to do what you're most qualified at, running your business and satisfying customers.
What can Sugar Express do for you?
Sugar CRM doesn't lock you into any one vendor's offerings, or even to a single platform. Its web-based interface provides a centralized way for any computer with a browser to access and modify all aspects of the system. If you'd rather work with your data in programs with which you are already familiar, Sugar CRM features plugins for and integration with many Microsoft products such as Outlook for calendaring and email, and Office for documents and reports. If neither of these meets your needs, the fact that sugar crm is open source means that you can either change it yourself or hire a competent developer to do it for you, meeting whatever unique challenges your business may face.
The system also exports data via web services, thus greatly expanding the options available for customization and the developers available to implement them. In addition, data is provided in various syndication feeds, and layouts can be customized via dragging and dropping. As such, a great degree of customization is available even to those without developer expertise. When your business grows, your CRM can grow with you, and you can simply upgrade to more featureful plans.
These key advantages are quite massive taken alone, but Sugar Express is a quite competitive CRM for Small Business solution when compared with other solutions, providing enough integrated tools to maintain a single view of a customer. If you're already using an existing CRM system such as SalesForce or ACT but wish to utilize Sugar's numerous competitive advantages, it offers an import facility that seamlessly migrates existing data into the new system.
Sugar Express supports creation of up to five separate accounts. Each account has associated contacts, calendars, tasks and notes. Leads and prospects are also tracked, and all of these details can be integrated into Outlook for seamless synchronization between computers and mobile devices.
Sugar Express is far more than a centralized store for Outlook information, however. Sales metrics are automatically tracked and are made available on the dashboard, your view of individual and overall performance of your business. Such statistics include a sales opportunities pipeline, lead sources and outcomes. Having this information summarized provides a quick way of acting on promising leads before the competition can do so.
The sheer volume of statistical data tracked by Sugar Express is not only for reference. Rather, Sugar can produce aggregate statistics and forecasts based on the data it collects. Such forecasted figures include revenue potential, probability of closing a sale and expected close date. Using these metrics, Sugar Express can sort contacts based on their importance to your business.
Traditional email systems are user rather than customer centric. That is, email intended for you is only visible by you. Sugar Express associates much of its data with customers rather than users, however. By doing so, all information on any given customer is instantly and centrally available to anyone who might realistically need access to it. In this manner, support staff can instantly have all necessary data on a customer without having to request it again.
While the dashboard includes conveniently summarized information, more detailed reports are sometimes necessary to drill down into certain aspects of your business. Sugar Express provides both stock and custom reports, each pre-formatted and informative.
Many other features contribute to Sugar Express's competitive edge as a great CRM for Small Business. Email campaign management helps keep customers updated on the latest happenings in your business. Integrated issue tracking and threaded discussion forums facilitate customer discussion both with your staff and with each other. Nicely formatted quotes invoices can be created, printed or emailed to contacts. Employee directories and shared calendars help employees to better coordinate among themselves, as well as to track the activities of the business itself.
Sugar CRM has also received various accolades as a leading CRM for Small Business. Such publications as CRM Magazine, InfoWorld, Customer Interaction Solutions and Intelligent Enterprise have recognized sugar crm and its various offerings as being an exceptional choice for small business.
CRM is not just for larger business, as Sugar Express and other offerings are beginning to demonstrate. As a hosted service, Sugar Express obviates the need for small, budget-conscious organizations to acquire additional technical resources. Its flexibility and openness ensures that your business will never be locked in to any vendor's technology, and its cutting edge features make it a competent CRM offering.
As such, any small business considering investigating customer relationship management would do well to evaluate what Sugar Express has to offer.
Customer Service Week - October 5-9 2009
The Customer Service Week is closing in rapidly. It's the perfect week to put both your customers and those who serve them, in the spotlights!
Customer service week might sound like just another commercialized celebration time with no real meaning behind it besides trying to make customer service representatives feel legitimate in their choice of occupation. But in reality, the customer service week was proclaimed as a way to recognize the importance customer service has on our lives as consumers and human beings in general.
It affects the economy, the way people think about one another, and it even offers perspective as to how one human being can learn to effectively communicate with another, even if they aren’t seeing eye to eye.
To me, this should be a huge deal that every customer service agent gets to experience! After all, the business is stressful and you have to be good to do the job properly. This kind of dedication deserves some thanks!
So, if you are an employer that has never thought about making it special for your employees, it’s never too late.
And if you are an employee just learning about it or who isn’t lucky enough to work for a call center who observes customer service week remember that you can make it happen if you want to by educating co-workers about the week and bringing them all together to celebrate!
Need a customer service week slogan?
Need some customer service quotes to inspire?
Escape the Corporation
As you may or may not know, this year I was able to 'escape the corporation' by becoming my own boss. Running Customer Service Point has been instrumental in that. In the 5 years of its existence, I've learned so much about what goes into running a business, that I started to see myself as an entrepeneur.
And I have to credit Site Build It! (the tools and method I use to create and maintain the site) for it. Ken Evoy (owner of the company that provides Site Build It!, Sitesell) has created nothing less than an MBA in a box. I've learned so much about what goes into establishing a successful online business (not 'just' building a site), that I finally could see myself as a free man.
I mention this because Site Build It! is currently on offer. It really works, first to earn some extra money, with the very real potential of making yourself free. Like I did.
Read more about Site Build It! (Check out the order page for the offer)
CustomerServicePoint.com Info
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Customer Servings is the newsletter for www.customerservicepoint.com, your resource on improving customer service. The newsletter is sent at irregular intervals.
Customer Servings is for you! If you have any suggestions for subjects you would like to see in future issues, or have comments in general on Customer Servings or Customer Service Point, please contact us. We welcome your remarks!
(C) 2009, Erwin & Marjan Steneker You may use original articles in Customer Servings, if you attach the following bio (including the link): Erwin & Marjan Steneker are passionate about good customer service, check out their website at http://www.customerservicepoint.com/