SugarCRM Launches Sugar Serve for Customer Support

SugarCRM today launched Sugar Serve for automating customer support processes. Sugar Serve puts everything agents need to work support cases right at their fingertips in a single integrated and optimized console experience.

"This is unlike any level of support for customer service agents on the market today," said SugarCRM's CEO, Craig Charlton, in a statement. "With our Service Console, we've put all the critical information for resolving a support case into a single panel, helping our customers reduce case resolution times, improve [service-level agreement] achievement, increase customer satisfaction, and improve support experiences. And that puts them on the path of cultivating customers for life."

The Service Console is a key feature of Sugar Serve, placing essential data points, such as next-best action recommendations based on SLA, account and contact information, account activity history and even case details, front and center, with no searching or navigation required.

Other key features include the following:

  • SLA Management--Prioritizes work, ensures SLA achievement, and measures support performance through the coordinated management of complex SLAs, multiregion business centers, and business hours;
  • SugarBPM Automation--Leverages out-of-the-box workflows and SugarBPM to prioritize work; route, reassign, and escalate cases; calculate follow-up dates; and send notifications;
  • Self-Service--Enables customers to resolve issues and find answers to questions with a customer portal and knowledge base; and
  • Reporting and Analytics--Provides support center managers deeper insights into the metrics that matter with more than 60 pre-packaged reports and dashboards.

Sugar Serve is part of Sugar's 9.1 release, which also includes the following:

  • Sugar Sell--Sugar's sales automation solution;
  • Sugar Market--A rebranding of Sugar's recently acquired marketing automation solution, Salesfusion;
  • SugarIdentity--Provides federated identity and comprehensive single sign-on across Sugar's applications and services, helping customers securely manage user identities and access to applications and services in the Sugar ecosystem;
  • Tile View--Provides a pivot table-like organizational structure to the opportunity pipeline, including managing opportunities by sales stage and expected close date;
  • Sugar Mobile Enhancements--Brings drill-down insights, enhanced collaboration, and a better quoting experience for multiple currencies; and
  • SugarBPM Advanced Email Handling--Monitors and triggers email based actions within workflows and allows setting From and Reply To email addresses in automated emails.

"SugarCRM's new Sugar Serve module, combined with the Salesfusion-powered Sugar Market, is a complementary addition to Sugar Sell, one of the strongest salesforce automation products on the market," said Dan Elman, lead CRM analyst at Nucleus Research. "The tightly coupled integration of all three is a key enabler to providing predictive insights that span the full customer journey."

"Our vision is clear, and we will continue to drive the future of customer experience with powerful products and innovative ideas by anticipating and fulfilling the needs of customers before they realize they have them," Charlton added.