A Leading Outsourcing Contact Centre Provider has Chosen SugarCRM to Manage their Sales Initiatives

The Customer

Established in 1997, this customer has become one of the leading providers of outsourced contact centre solutions in the UK. They specialise in providing customer service, acquisition and retention solutions via multiple channels including inbound and outbound call handling, email, SMS, fax and voice recognition software. Their client base is now made up of some of the world’s leading banks, insurers, retailers, publishers, car manufacturers, mobile and fixed line operators, ISP’s, utilities and government organisations. Examples include BT, Pizza Hut, Royal Mail Post Office, Virgin, and Lloyds TSB.

Challenges

Although their customer base continues growing and sales team expanding, the company’s Sales Director and his team have found it increasingly challenging to track and manage customer relationships effectively and proactively with only tools like Excel sheets, Microsoft Outlook and basic contact management. Due to lack of a central portal for managing customer information, records of interaction histories about a customer may spread across different platforms with different team members. Some important information may not always be recorded or may only be known to a few members. Certain leads may not be attended in a timely fashion and potential opportunities may get lost.

Whilst the team is expanding, the Sales Director also found it more challenging to have clear visibility of his team’s pipelines and the status of potential customers, thus finding it more difficult to make effective sales forecasts. The Director believes that having a central one-stop portal to store all their customer and prospects information and the team’s interactions with them would enhance team collaboration and sales effectiveness.

Solutions

The company has selected an on-demand SugarCRM solution and Eupac as their SugarCRM implementation partner to address the above challenges. SugarCRM’s various modules allow the company to manage their customer relationships within a central portal, with all interaction histories, such as emails, meetings, tasks and calls, available to authorised users.

The company's sales team can now use Sugar's Activities module to manage and keep records of all calls, meetings and related tasks as well as schedule activities with optional alerts and reminders.

The Opportunities module allows the sales team and management to track and manage their potential opportunities easily and effectively including the use of various graphic charts in the dashboard, giving them clear visibility of their sales pipelines.

As a management tool, line managers can also use SugarCRM to assign tasks to team members (as well as entire projects consisting of multiple linked tasks), relate each task to a particular prospect or customer and track the progress of the task easily using Sugar’s task management function. Thanks to the Sugar Studio function, the customer can easily create their own customised fields and layouts to suit their unique business needs, without any programming/technical expertise or needing outside help.

As Sugar’s Microsoft Outlook Add-in can synchronise Outlook's information with SugarCRM, the company can continue using Microsoft Outlook concurrently and archive their emails and contacts to SugarCRM. Overall, SugarCRM gives the company a 360 degree view of their customer relationships and provides them with an important tool to improve sales productivity and further their success.