Andrew Staples – SugarCRM
Earlier this year, during SugarCon 2016, SugarCRM announced and demo’d the Customer Journey Plugin. We are excited to say the Sugar Customer Journey Solution (the plugin combined with the Sugar Platform), which automates complex business processes and maps them to the customer journey is now available.
As you may know, customer journey mapping is an important exercise that helps companies understand their customer’s perspective so they can meet needs and expectations. It also drives companies to reach all the business goals for individual customers – such as long-term engagement, buying additional products or services, or becoming a reference. The customer journey map itself is a visual diagram of the way your customers engage with you throughout the buying cycle. From the time they learn your company’s name or find you on Google, all the way to the time they purchase their first product/service from you, and even beyond that.
While it’s a fairly common exercise, the real challenge is turning the customer journey map from a theoretical framework or tracking mechanism into a practical tool proactively guides customers throughout their journeys. Many companies have tried to capture every aspect of their business with customer journey mapping, and as a result, created beautiful documents that did little more than sit on the shelf.
Enter the Customer Journey Solution. It was developed by AddOptify, a longtime SugarCRM partner, in cooperation with internationally-recognized customer strategist, Phil Winters. It is based on best practices from his work with more than 650 organizations that have reoriented their businesses around a deeper understanding of the customer’s decision processes.
The new plugin comes with a customer decision Indicator chart, which displays the individual customer’s progress through the journey, and an advanced customer decision workflow panel, which quickly describes every task or action the user must complete in order to help a customer advance to the next decision stage. Each activity in the customer journey is modeled as a native Sugar task, call or meeting. The result is a streamlined process that synchronizes all customer-facing activities, from marketing and sales through on-boarding and renewal.
If you’re new to customer journey mapping, don’t worry. The Sugar Customer Journey Solution includes industry-specific customer journey templates that you can use to quickly define the journeys that are most applicable to your customer base. The journey can span the entire customer lifecycle, or just a specific timeframe.
In short, the Customer Journey Solution lets you overlay the journey with the tasks that you know need to happen at every step of the way, even if your customer isn’t aware of them. It opens new opportunities for differentiating yourself in the market by providing a differentiated and superior customer experience, and – probably most importantly – provides a foundation for all staff in your organization to better coordinate and interact by taking the customer’s perspective.
The Customer Journey Solution is available for all versions of the Sugar Platform (Sugar Professional, Sugar Enterprise and Sugar Ultimate 7.6 and above) for $15 per user, per month.
To learn more about how you can optimize your customer journeys, click here.
For all your SugarCRM Consulting needs contact InnoventCRM today on 1300 781 681 or info@innoventcrm.com.au