SugarCRM vs. Salesforce: 5 Reasons Why You Should Choose Sugar Sell
User experience (UX) is everything in e-commerce. Today’s consumers are agile: They glide effortlessly between devices, making purchases on laptops and smartphones as they flit from place to place. They want mobile-optimized sites, personalized shopping experiences, and instant in-depth product information. They’re busy, they can be demanding, and they’ll bounce right out of your e-commerce site if they don’t like what they see.
So, does UX begin and end with a slick website? No.
UX incorporates every aspect of a consumer’s interaction with a product, service, or system. To achieve real success online, you need to make everything about your online presence —from your site navigation menu to your after-sales service—about UX.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software can help you create a great UX, increasing conversions and boosting your bottom line. How? By leveraging the consumer data that you already have to help you hone all aspects of your site, process flow, and after-sales service. As your UX improves, so do your sales opportunities and conversion rate.
In short, CRM software is a no-brainer—but before you settle for a familiar name, review your options carefully. Two CRMs, SugarCRM and Salesforce, are both well known in the e-commerce world. We’re going to tell you exactly why Sugar Sell has the edge.
What Is CRM Software?
“Data! Data! Data!” he cried impatiently. “I can’t make bricks without clay.” —Sherlock Holmes (The Adventure of the Copper Beeches, 1892)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle certainly gave his most famous fictional character, Sherlock Holmes, a sharp mind as his greatest asset. And even now, almost a century and a half later, this particular quote rings true. It is simply impossible to proceed logically without data. As Sherlock says, you can’t make bricks without clay.
In e-commerce terms, clay is consumer data, including emails, account updates, social media messages, sales, returns, and customer service interactions. To build an online retail or wholesale business, you need to gather as much information as possible about three distinct types of consumers:
- Your current customers
- Your past customers
- Your potential customers
Where do your site visitors come from? What percentage of your site visitors make purchases? What do they order? Are they satisfied or unsatisfied? Do they come back for more? How many of them contact your customer service team? How do customer service interactions pan out? Are your current customers satisfied with the level of service they receive from you? What about product satisfaction? What percentage of your customers leave reviews? How many of them are likely to recommend your product or service?
A great CRM will help you ask and answer all those questions. In a broad sense, customer relationship management software captures and analyzes data. Products like Sugar Sell zero in on individual consumers, tracking all aspects of current, past, or potential customer journeys and interactions with your company. You get an easy-to-read visual representation of consumer data, from your first interaction to your most recent.
Let’s look at five ways Sugar Sell delivers more than its nearest rival.
1. Intuitive User Interface
Importantly, Sugar Sell’s first perk has to do with UX. Endowed with a great interface, Sugar Sell is easy to use — even if you’re new to CRM. As soon as you log onto your dashboard, you will see a breakdown of service, sales, and marketing campaign data, all arranged on a clean, white background. Updates and messages pop up immediately, so you can get to work on the most pressing issues right away.
Everything is color-coded, making it easy to figure out what’s going on at a glance. Navigate to the “Calls” section, for example, and you’ll see status messages in white, green, and red:
| Color | Status |
| White | Scheduled |
| Green | Completed |
| Red | Canceled |
Sales representatives using the Sugar Sell system gain instant access to customer histories, hierarchies, and coverage, and they can use this data to provide each consumer with a personalized experience. Bingo: increased customer satisfaction.
2. Part of the SugarCRM Ecosystem
Sugar Sell slots conveniently into the SugarCRM ecosystem. Sugar products work together to generate a complete customer relations management experience:
- Sugar Market is a marketing automation tool which helps you research your consumer base, gain visibility in the marketplace, and generate new leads.
- Sugar Serve makes customer service simple with at-a-glance customer service histories and convenient self-serve portals.
Every part of the Sugar main ecosystem (Sugar Sell, Sugar Market, and Sugar Serve) works seamlessly as a standalone unit or as part of the whole. Helpful features like split-screen make it easier to scrape intelligence in a hurry, and pop-up menus mean you can update consumer information without leaving current work. Once you get the hang of Sugar Sell—and Sugar University can help you learn the ropes in a hurry—you’ll find other Sugar products much easier to use. In comparison, end-users often find Salesforce extremely confusing and hard to master.
3. Logical Workflow
When you use Sugar Sell in SugarCRM Enterprise or Ultimate editions, you can put vital business processes on autopilot using convenient drag-and-drop visual design interfaces. Complementary products like SugarBPM remove barriers to success by turning complicated workflows into interactive diagrams. Easy-to-understand icons represent specific actions, which optimize complex decision cycles using powerful predetermined rules.
Managers can troubleshoot problems more quickly, using process-monitoring and audit tools. Visual snapshots of ongoing sales workflows come in handy at meetings because they make your sales process much easier to explain, and customer histories are easy to locate and navigate, so representatives know exactly what to say at any given moment. In a nutshell, Sugar has workflow convenience down pat.
4. Sleek Integrations
SugarCRM offers its subscribers an omnichannel customer relations management experience. It has a convenient mobile app, so representatives can work on smartphones and tablets as well as laptop or desktop computers. To put it simply: Sugar Sell makes work-from-home arrangements function smarter and more easily than Salesforce.
Sugar also works beautifully with a range of other integration capabilities, including Slack, Microsoft Outlook, social media channels like Twitter and LinkedIn, telephony apps, Cisco WebEx, GoToMeeting, and Dun & Bradstreet customer insights. Meanwhile, financial data streams effortlessly into Sage Intacct and QuickBooks.
It doesn’t end there: Sugar has an open API and an SDK, so you can extend its user interface with your business’s own bespoke programs.
5. Excellent Customer Service and Support
Sugar Sell does not disappoint in the all-important arena of Customer service and support, either. All of its subscribers get a free customer-facing self-service portal stocked with self-help documents. Because of its open-source origins, Sugar has a dedicated community whose members offer enthusiastic help to CRM beginners.
Sugar Enterprise-level clients who choose the ultimate package of SugarCRM receive personalized service from a dedicated account manager. Sugar also offers other valuable customer support tools like responsive phone support, live chat, and troubleshooting via email.
And while Salesforce has a customer service team, it tends to be far more difficult to get in touch with. Regular users, or “Standard Support Customers” are limited to calling during business hours, and can only receive phone support for what Salesforce calls “Severity 1 issues” which includes:
- “Critical production issue affecting all users.”
- “Includes system unavailability and data integrity issues with no workaround available.”
This means dealing with serious issues like “major functionality” being impacted or “significant performance degradation” and time-sensitive requests like “requests for feature activation or a data export” require users to open a support case and wait for a reply while key features are unusable. Salesforce’s “Premier Support Customers” are able to get phone support 24/7, but they don’t enjoy the benefits of a dedicated account manager who knows their account inside and out.
In Conclusion
A consistent PCMag Business Choice Award winner for reliability, satisfaction, and tech support, Sugar Sell’s powerful features deliver in so many ways. It’s easy to use; it’s a central part of the wider SugarCRM ecosystem; it has a logical workflow; it integrates smoothly. Finally, Sugar’s customer service team responds quickly to queries, alleviating minor technological headaches in minutes.
Sweet by name and sweet by nature, Sugar Sell is an excellent ingredient for e-commerce success.
