Larry's main message in this interview is that CRM needs to expand beyond Sales Dept's to every part of the organization that interfaces with the Customer. (Certainly good for bottom lines of SaaS companies like SugarCRM who license their software per user per month.) I agree this approach is a great way to have the entire organization be customer focused by enabling them with information they need to competently interact with each customer in a meaningful way.
A little bitter sweet for me as I would as Larry Augustine what about if my CRM implementation is failing BECAUSE I use SugarCRM.
While every system has it quirks, bug and missing features, SugarCRM certainly has some VERY notable holes that have been around for quite some time and they have no plans when these 'Feature Requests' might be fixed.
Duplicate Detection
A great way to look stupid in front of a customer is to be using a partial and incomplete duplicate record. Any company who uses any type of CRM fights the battle with duplicate records and must maintain system and processes to battle them. In SugarCRM the tool you use to search for duplicate is grossly under-powered. You can't even OR a bunch of potential identifying clauses together. The search tool ANDs every entry. Therefore, to run a decent search, because you can't OR a bunch of data overlapping clauses into one query, you MUST run ONE query for each data point you want to search on for potential conflict. Talk about inefficient. What decade are we in Larry? This is the question I get from the person who we assign to perform this ridiculously inefficient search, everyday, multiple times for every new lead.http://www.sugarcrm.com/support/bugs.html#issue_47265
Workflow can't make Entity Associations: Lead to Campaign
Anyone it Marketing knows you need to justify and define your spend base on the results of your campaigns. One main goal of any campaign is to generate leads. Associating a Lead with a Campaign is a must have operation. ERRRR, hard stop. SugarCRM won't let you write a Workflow rule or Mass Update rule to associate a Lead with a Campaign. So I can't write a Workflow Rule that say, Upon Save of New Lead, set Lead.Campaign = Campaign X, when during a specific 'Campaign' season. Workflow lets me write all sorts of great rules, but traversing the Lead to Campaign relationship is not in it list of doable actions. What!!! The Mass Update feature has the same issue. Therefore, Lead involvement in a Campaign can only be set manually. (Insert cost for unnecessary manual lead data management here.)http://www.sugarcrm.com/support/bugs.html#issue_48521
I can't imaging how any modern day CRM system can be successful without these features. We continue to stammer along as a SugarCRM customer without them. I don't think we'll be buying licenses for the rest of the users in the company.
Paul,
ReplyDeleteWhile, as you say, every system has its quirks and missing features (Sugar included), I want to make sure you know that we listen to and value your feedback. We have recognized both of the issues you raised as functional gaps, and plan to spend time bulking up both Duplicate Checking and Workflow in the near future. Based on the feedback we've received to date from our customers and partners, we are making some changes starting in Sugar 7.x line in both Duplicate Checking and Workflow. We are also opening up a number of integrations that help with both of those functions, recognizing that other providers have great solutions in these areas as well-- why not leverage them?
If you'd like to discuss the feature requests you linked to, or any other ideas you may have in those areas, drop me an e-mail and we'll talk! We run many customer-centric activities, including a Customer Advisory Board and would love to have you help us define and evaluate our future product designs.
- Julian Ostrow
Sr. Director of Product Strategy
SugarCRM
You can contact the group at products @ sugarcrm . com.
Hi Julian:
ReplyDeleteI greatly appreciate your feedback, suggestions and follow-up. I'm glad to hear that these items will likely be addressed in a future release of Sugar 7.x. They are both about 2 years old now, from date of reporting. Prior to one of our annual subscription renewals I was pushing my SugarCRM account & product development reps. to get these items escalated to the point of at least having 'Targeted in Release' value so that I could advise our stakeholders of a potential fix date. Unfortunately, has not happen yet as it appears one or both do require some major overhauls to be feasible as a fix, I was lead to believe.
In the mean time I will certainly take a look at the SugarCRM app market and integration to see if any of these can be of use to overcome the challenges we are facing.
I will also consider participation in some of the customer activities to assist in defining and evaluation future product designs.
Cheers, Paul
Paul,
ReplyDeleteUnderstood, and I certainly understand the frustration of watching a feature request sit for months (or years). I am implementing some process changes to increase the attention we're paying to these, and you should see that reflected soon. Again, feel free to contact me if you'd like to discuss the details of those features, and our enhancement plans.
Thanks!
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