Unpacking What’s New in SugarCRM’s Winter ‘19 Release

It’s been a few weeks since SugarCRM dropped its latest product release for those that run the cloud version of the CRM (Sugar on-premise customers will get these new features in the company’s upcoming Sugar 9 release later this spring).

The FayeBSG team has been evaluating the latest new features and enhancements. We’ve been cutting through the marketing buzzwords like collaboration, sales efficiency, and automation to get down to what this release actually means for Sugar customers.

Here are the highlights:

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As enterprise software evolves to become more like consumer technology, it’s no surprise that SugarCRM added a comment feature to Sugar. From Yelp to Instagram, users have proved they like to leave (and more importantly read) comments. They are less intrusive than a group email, but still accomplish the same goal of one-to-many communication.

The new comments log allows teams to better communicate and to keep track of each other’s progress. It is enabled by default in the bugs and case modules and can be added by administrators to other modules. Comments flow in chronological order and are time stamped.

This is a huge step in getting users to “live inside the CRM.” It eliminates the need for group emails and side conversations. Of course, the key is getting users to embrace commenting.

Quick Picks!

Product Catalogue Quick Picks sounds like something related to the latest Powerball jackpot, but it is SugarCRM’s name for a “my favorites” feature. As a new feature within the product catalog dashlet, the whole idea is to save sellers time by presenting them with their most used and most recent product SKUs, and letting them select them with one click.

If you work for a company with a lot of different product offerings, this feature will help you configure, manage and deliver accurate quotes quickly. So, the next time you say, “I’ll send that quote right over,” you’ll actually be able to do it.

Hint Insights

A quick refresher: Sugar Hint is an additional product offering that helps Sugar users gather a wealth of relationship intelligence about individuals from just a name and email address. It eliminates the need for lots of manual research and data entry and gathers customer intelligence from a broad range of social data sources.

Hint Insights adds real-time, breaking news about prospects and customers. The idea is that it would be really helpful to know if a prospect is quoted in a press article or gets a promotion.

The insights dashlet can be added to users’ dashboards for real-time news updates on accounts of their choice. News selection options on this dashlet include financial, press releases, personnel, and other general account insights to keep users in the know.

Advanced Workflow Moves Forward

Sugar’s Advanced CRM Workflow enables customers to automate complex business processes using CRM workflow automation.

In this new release, a big improvement is the ability to automatically create and update multiple records.  For example, when a call is made, Advanced Workflow can automatically inform all those involved with that account of the latest communication. Here’s another example: let’s say a customer service issue is resolved, advanced workflow can close out all tasks related to the record.

Advanced workflow is tricky for novice CRM users, but SugarCRM continues to try to push it beyond an administrator only feature. This is an important step in helping everyday users see the value and take the time to set up workflows.

We’d be happy to discuss the value of all the new features in SugarCRM’s related release. To get the ball rolling, don’t hesitate to contact FayeBSG.

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