Smashing the Data Silos with SugarCRM
Companies everywhere rely on data to provide critical information related to marketing initiatives, sales efforts, and customer interactions. Everything a business does each day—every customer interaction, every sale, and every marketing effort—can all be documented into spreadsheets, decks, and database files.
But it’s what companies do with all that data that matters because numbers on a page can only go so far with telling a story. Most of the time, those numbers, percentages, and forecasts need intelligent interpretation, so your business knows what to do next month, next year, and tomorrow.
Savvy team members can certainly help. There’s no replacing human intelligence, primarily when it’s arising from people who know your company and operations inside and out and can offer valuable context and experience when it comes to data analysis. But this is also where technology can work to your advantage.
What if a tool could analyze your company’s data and offer valuable insight and interpretation into the future? That’s what Sugar’s new initiative, HD-CX seeks to do with its powerful ability to predict using advanced AI methods.
Let’s take a closer look at what Sugar is doing to smash the data silos for businesses.
What Are Data Silos?
The metaphorical concept of data silos describes how large data sets reside in only one group in an organization. This data is not easily accessible by other groups. Instead, it is “stored” in an inaccessible silo, and the only people who have access to it are the people who work in that division or group.
When you think about it, it sort of makes sense—data is typically organized by individual company departments, such as HR, finance, administration, sales, marketing, and other divisions. Sometimes data from one division overlaps with another, but those overlaps often aren’t visible among departments because the data itself remains siloed.
Data silos prevent companies from gaining actionable, valuable insight into their customers—barring a high-definition customer experience. To get the full benefits from data analysis, businesses need a complete, 360-degree view of their customers and company. That’s what Sugar can do—provide deep insight into each critical business area so you can plan the next steps and increase revenue.
Origins of Data Silos
To understand how Sugar can help you smash your company’s data silos, it can be helpful to understand the ways in which these silos are created in the first place.
Data silos build naturally over time, as each division of a company stores data, all of which is relevant to how people do their jobs in that department.
Data silos are created:
- Within the Structures of an Organization: Before the cloud came along and revolutionized how businesses’ data is stored, different departments would create and manage their own data around their own procedures, goals, and individual policies.
- Inside a Company’s Culture: Every department, whether finance, HR, sales, or marketing, is used to working in its own bubble. While this isolation isn’t absolute—of course, there are cross-team meetings and projects—the culture of separation does tend to carry over to data.
- Through Technology: Within individual departments, data is handled with that team’s preferred or most useful method of technology, whether it’s project management software, spreadsheets, or other databases.
How SugarCRM Helps Smash the Data Silos
Storing data in the cloud does help somewhat by allowing multiple teams to access data outside their department. But Sugar’s tools go one step further, analyzing and interpreting the data that’s available to you and making predictions about it so you can decide your company’s next course of action.
Sugar has systems in place that tie into critical veins of unstructured data, no matter where it is—buried in someone’s inbox, websites, marketing automation tools, spreadsheets, and documents in the cloud—to help you find structure in the chaos and deliver valuable insight about your customers, both in their past behavior and the future.
HD-CX
HD-CX, which stands for High-Definition Customer Experience, is a new initiative that Sugar is introducing in order to help businesses achieve crystal-clear clarity when it comes to their customers.
HD-CX’s ability to be time-aware means it can explore past customer behavior, formulate better situational awareness about the present, and make more accurate predictions about the future.
This type of technology applies to businesses of all sizes and within many industries. So how does HD-CX help to smash the data silos?
Well, consider that (according to Dun & Bradstreet) 91% of CRM data is incomplete and 70% is irrelevant after a year. The AI and machine-learning algorithms that power HD-CX aren’t limited to just the data in your CRM—they can make accurate predictions using advanced models that go beyond the scope of what your CRM data could tell you by itself.
HD-CX combines two types of data: Historical CRM data and public data, which includes information from your industry, the company as a whole, your customers, and the market. And since this information can be accessed and interpreted across departments, you can be sure that sales, marketing, and service are all on the same page.
What to Expect from SugarCRM
- Managers and executives can expect to receive timely, accurate, and relevant CRM information for reporting to others.
- Improved reporting capabilities and visualizations so managers and executives can better understand their business.
- Predictions relevant to customer behavior—information that can help drive sales and marketing efforts.
If you’re ready to discuss how Sugar can help your company smash its data silos, reach out to us to schedule a demo or for more specialized assistance. Whether you need help with marketing automation, sales automation, customer service, or artificial intelligence integration, we have the skills to deliver what your company needs. Sugar can be reached by phone at 877-842-7276, or you can fill out our contact form, and someone from our sales team will be in touch.
