Kustomer vs. Sugar Sell (SugarCRM)

It works really well for you to ask a teammate to review a case/email/message and provide some input since you can all review the same conversations and client accounts. They can also cover your inbox using your email handle in case you are out of the office suing some well deserved PTO.

Incentivized

The way Community Tax uses Sugar from a users point of view is, it can house a lot of information for either a company or individual with the option of adding additional sub cases . The down side is there are licenses issued per user and 1 per user is not enough because most of the time we are multitasking. Therefore a program/software would be more suitable instead of using a URL.

Incentivized

• All customer data (past orders, communication with customer service, rewards account data) is in one place. This helps agents avoid confusion and reduces the number of tabs they need to open.
• The Knowledge Base (or K Base) is very helpful. Any time we roll out a new policy or have a limited-time promotion, we can add all the relevant information and worksheets there for the convenience of the agents. That way they can stay in a chat while looking up the answer to a question.
• We can seamlessly move from chat into email if the customer leaves or the queue times are too long. All the interactions will stay on the customer profile page, so they are kept up to date.

Incentivized

• Very easy to set up and configure reports among teams. Very customizable and allows me to build reports that illustrate how the team is performing.
• Exporting granular reports into excel for in depth analysis and actionable measures.
• Ability to mass upload lots of information and leads. Important for our team to import lots of information on prospecting clients.

Incentivized

• For our team, the feature that defaults all notes to begin in "done" status is difficult. Throughout each day we need to have notes open and assigned back and forth to different teams, and we have to remember to manually "open" each note. There is too much room for human error with this setting, and it is easy for important notes to be missed if a user forgets to open the note.
• Similarly, it can be hard to remember to assign emails/notes to a particular team in addition to a user. We almost exclusively work out of team inboxes, and if someone on Care writes an email to a customer, the email will automatically be "done" when it is created, and it will be assigned to the user who wrote it, but not also to the user's team. There are instances where an email needs to be snoozed for several days/hours with further action needed, and unless the user remembers to assign the email to their team it may "awake" from the snooze and not be visible to anyone except the user who created it. Similarly to my first comment, this leaves a lot of room for human error and is not very intuitive.
• Personally, I do not love that all tickets/emails/notes are jumbled together in the same inbox. While this gives visibility to everything on the "to do" list at the same time, it can be visually overwhelming. We have created unique folders for certain types of projects or categories of work, but have experienced tech glitches or just the awkwardness of another step to manually read the note, determine what type of category it is, and then manually assign it to another folder. Would love to have things auto-sort and take out this manual lift.
• I love the idea of the autopilot setting, but we have not been able to use this for our work because it sorts items based on time, and not based on priority. In our line of work, we may have an urgent situation arise that needs attention before an email that was sent in 60 minutes ago. The autopilot feature would push the email to my associates sooner than it would the urgent situation from 5 minutes ago. Due to this, we manually monitor inboxes and assign work to ourselves and others.

Incentivized

• The back-end programming (logical hooks) for advanced customizations could benefit from a more user-friendly interface
• General layout could be improved by the addition of modern templates to customize the standard look and feel
• Support communities could be further improved with the addition of videos on how to do specific configuration, modules.

Incentivized

Because there's no other tool like Kustomer

Incentivized

Our organization will continue to use Sugar as long as it remains cost effective and it addresses the majority of our needs. I will, however, recommend looking into other options once our needs increase and there is additional budget for some bigger named and more robust platform options. I feel if the application was friendlier to end users we would get better productivity as well.

There is a learning curve, but it is more than worth it, especially to have a dedicated resource pointed at Kustomer and any other software it interacts with. The basic implementation is useful, and powerful - certainly a MASSIVE upgrade over taking care of your customers in an email inbox or shuffling between multiple windows and applications! It is also set up really well to grow and reconfigure with your business. I'm a big fan.

Incentivized

In the overall usage of the system I still give it a 10 out 10 because it's our day to day system that we use here at work. We all have come to love it because it's quick and easy to use. New updates are given to us by our supervisors or managers and it's easy to do new things in the system. The only Issue like I said before that I'm having is that once I put a payment date and want to modify the dates, it will only allow me to eliminate the date but not put a new one back in.

Incentivized

Because Kustomer is available when you need it

Incentivized

SugarCRM has never been down for us.

Because ages load quickly, reports complete in a reasonable time frame, given their complexity

Incentivized

No response time issues ever. Very productive due to its ease of use.

It’s a great tool that has helped our company and overall customer service. I believe if we were able to edit certain setting for our specific company that would be hopeful. We have been told before that certain desires of ours would make a change throughout all of Kustomer. Which is not something we would want, we would just want that to change for our business.

Incentivized

Because it provides us with the necessary support and with the updates that are being made in the system, it allows us to improve our work experience and makes it easier for the entire team. When requesting some type of support it is effective and immediate and with this, it [does not] stagnate our productivity.

Incentivized

Because they are very hands-on in training us and very approachable

Incentivized

We feel clasroom training is essential to ensure user adoption and buy-in. Video and on-line training courses gave their place but being in a classroom setting enables the Team to make any potential CRM issues visble right up front.

It was very easy to understand.

Incentivized

Only part of an implemementation as noted previously.

Nothing really because it is easy to use. After an hour of using it, we're already getting the hang of it.

Incentivized

Study, study, and study. Be prepared to train everyday until all processes are flowing nicely. The CRM is the elephant and figuring out where to take the first bite can be a challenge. But there is only one way to eat this elephant, one bite at a time. Systematic planning is very important.

Incentivized

I find it baffling how little data can be stored or associated with a customer in many other systems, and how difficult that can be to set up. It is fine if you already have a robust CDP that you can hook up and use to power your CRM, but it is rare that an organization has the resources or the customer-focus to rally behind setting up their customer service/experience team up for success. With a platform like Kustomer, you can actually evolve the relationship over time, or use the past experiences (number of contacts, purchases, previous issues, etc.) to power your next steps with a customer, making for a much more nuanced relationship with a human, not just a ticket.

Incentivized

SugarCRM does not stack up well against Bloomreach; we moved away from SugarCRM to Bloomreach, which was much more suited and easily integrated into many different platforms. Bloomreach has a much nicer user interface for debugging and simpler screens for less technical audiences to utilize 3rd. Party support is rarely required, and lots of easy-to-understand documentation is available.

Incentivized

Because customer is flexible and scalable

Incentivized

Works from 2-300 Users in our experience.

• We’re getting so much positive feedback — which is not something you traditionally associate with a customer care team — because we’re making it effortless for customers to deliver both positive and negative feedback, and we can now resolve the bad feedback really really quickly.
• Primarily from our increased efficiency with Kustomer, we’ve seen a significant reduction of $3 to $4 for every cost per contact.

Incentivized

• I know that SugarCRM has made a positive impact on my day to day work. Since we have made the change to SugarCRM (over a year ago) it has made life easier, more productive, and efficient.
• Organization is key and this CRM has done this exceptionally for me.

Incentivized