Eco-decking Sweeten Customer Service With Sugar CRM
Green decking company can now treat every customer ‘like an old friend’ with the aid of a hosted CRM service...
When any one of its thousands of customers calls up Outdure, the exclusive distributor of the Eco-decking range of environmentally friendly decking and fence materials, that person is treated like an old friend.
“When you have as many customers as we do,” says Craig Fountain, Outdure’s managing director, “you can’t know everyone’s history, the jobs that people are working on, the products they’ve purchased or the details of an individual quote.
“This is especially true in our case, where we have a team of salespeople all nurturing enquiries, generating quotes, scheduling dispatches with the warehouse, and providing after-sales service. But now, with SugarCRM, any one of our staff can immediately access a complete customer record and see, at a glance, the customer’s entire history. Our customers love it because they get prompt service. And we like it because it makes our life so much easier.”
Eco-decking’s Sugar CRM solution is hosted by Auckland-based TEIQ. “We’re not IT experts,” says Outdure's Fountain. “We sell decking and fencing. We didn’t want the hassle of servers, security, maintenance, upgrades and all of the other headaches associated with running a complex CRM solution on our own. So, being able to access SugarCRM as a hosted browser-based service has been a huge advantage for us.”
Fountain had been investigating CRM solutions for his business when he first became aware of Sugar CRM.
“One of our early employees had used Sugar in an earlier role and was a big fan,” he says. “We did some investigating and found out that Sugar was supported in NZ by TEIQ. So we called them up and explained our situation. James Beamish-White and the team were extremely knowledgeable about SugarCRM, and CRM in general, and helped us define our requirements and prioritise what needed to be done. We liked what they had to say. So, we developed a plan together, with time-lines, milestones and staged costings, and gave them the OK to develop a customised web-based solution. It had to be affordable and meet our specific needs.”
Sugar Sweet On Open-Source
SugarCRM has a number of features that make it ideal for the NZ marketplace. “It is an open source application which means that, in this case, there is no licence fee for the source code,” says James Beamish-White, director of TEIQ. “There are commercial releases – the Professional and Enterprise Editions – that have additional features, but, for many mid-sized companies in NZ, the basic code is enough to get started.” “The ‘no licence fee’ pricing was a big factor for us,” adds Fountain. “Many of the so-called out-of-the-box solutions we looked at still needed customisation that we would have had to pay for over and above the cost of the software. So we opted for the open source solution and paid TEIQ only for the customisation.” Outdure also pays a $30 a month hosting fee.
“SugarCRM lends itself very well to incremental implementation,” continues Beamish-White. “Because this was Outdure’s first online CRM initiative, they wanted to take it slow. We would discuss with them their immediate needs, help them refine exactly what they wanted and then build and test the application.
After they were comfortable with the results, and had used the system for a while, they would come back to us with some additional requirements. Again, we would help them identify what it was they were trying to achieve and then add those capabilities. We’ve been through the process about three times now and they are quite pleased with the results.”
Trial Before Going Live
Because Sugar CRM is hosted, TEIQ can set up a trial version before it goes live. “We thoroughly test any revisions before we roll them out,” says Beamish-White. “So, when we get feedback from the sales team we can add their suggestions into the final release.”
“We liked the fact that the TEIQ team could customise SugarCRM to make it do exactly what we wanted,” says Fountain. “For instance, we have a ‘quote request’ form on our website that prompts the prospect – via drop-down menus or free text-fields – for detailed information on what they want. It feeds straight into our CRM and opens a new contact file.
When we reply to the prospect we already have most of the information we need to provide an accurate quote. This saves us considerable time and allows us to respond very quickly to requests. We also have a similar online form that handles requests for our newsletter.”
“Another key benefit is that we can access our SugarCRM application from any browser at any time,” concludes Fountain. “If we need to log on after hours, or at a client site, it is no problem. And because the information on each customer is available, any one of our staff has complete access to a customer’s history, regardless of whether they have ever spoken to them before. This means prompt, effective customer service as it allows our team to find information quickly for clients, enabling us to treat them with the respect they deserve.”
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