5 Reasons to Choose SugarCRM and the New HD-CX Standard
“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence – it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” – Peter Drucker.
SugarCRM: Transformed Customer Relations Management
Sugar has already had the privilege of making a landmark change in the landscape of CRM (Customer Relations Management) software with the introduction of the
But having pioneered one major innovation doesn’t mean SugarCRM is standing still. Industry innovators need to maintain agility with more diligence and dedication than anyone. And with Sugar’s acquisition of Node — creators of the industry’s first AI-as-a-service platform — the company acquired a fresh pool of talent and ideas that have helped power a major innovation, one that stands to be just as game-changing as the time-aware platform before it.
The High-Definition Customer Experience (HD-CX) is that innovation. Sugar’s team was already working on the concept of HD-CX when it became clear that the upcoming merger with the extraordinary Node team and its technology could radically accelerate and expand the effort. As this becomes a reality, let’s take a look at what the term means and at some of the major benefits it offers: yet more reasons to choose SugarCRM.
Hi-Definition, Hi-Fidelity: The Fundamentals of HD-CX
While time-aware CRM is about getting an accurate and detailed picture of where you are and where you’ve been, HD-CX is about predictive insight.
Employing incredibly accurate predictive analysis, building on the synergy between Sugar’s platform and powerful technologies, and tried and tested technologies pioneered by Node, HD-CX completes the time-aware CX platform. It expands the time-awareness paradigm from capturing a total picture of historical customer details into using AI-powered analysis to make predictions from the data, driving better business choices in new ways.
The best way to think about HD-CX is as a standard rather than a product. The example of HD-TV is a useful analogy: 1080p introduced a new standard that radically raised the bar of expectations for television in ways that were unimaginable before it happened and irresistible afterward. HD-TV was about reproducing audio and video with fidelity never seen before: high resolution, maximum accuracy, and minimum “noise.”
Today, most companies are struggling with “low-fidelity” CX data: incomplete, inaccurate, redundant, or out-of-date, and focusing on their current state without a time-aware view that shows management how the company got to where it is. The massively augmented version of time-awareness that comes with HD-CX gives companies an accurate picture of customer history and the ability to predict likely future states.
It’s a new standard that will bring users to the next frontier in customer experience. Below, we’ll look at several of the biggest reasons to take that journey.
5 Reasons to Experience SugarCRM with the HD-CX Standard
Even with a disciplined approach to CX, a company’s understanding is still confined to the data it decided to collect and the questions it thought to ask. Adding a predictive element to the picture — using an existing time-aware solution as its fully implemented foundation and enriched with curated data from public sources — makes it possible to anticipate those unknown things you wouldn’t otherwise realize are missing. This comes with several standout benefits.
1. Enhanced Predictability
The most fundamental benefit that HD-CX brings to the table is a meaningful reduction in the guesswork and biases that bedevil most attempts at prediction. Replacing opinion and hunch with an estimation of probable outcomes that enable data-backed decision-making is a major leap forward. Accurate predictive capabilities make it possible to identify trends, analyzing vast volumes of historical and enriched data to discern, overcome or capitalize on once-hidden tendencies. Proactive issue resolution becomes possible, too, as you make use of AI-driven guidance to track down problems early and address small issues before they grow into serious ones.
Having access to these kinds of capabilities is called predictability. The research is detailed: Companies with better predictability are also the more highly-valuated long-term performers, a flawless correlation.
2. Supercharged Performance
Enhanced predictability makes it possible to decrease your costs. When you can optimize your targeting quickly and accurately, answer questions in a more timely fashion and with less effort, and reduce the resolution costs of customer support cases, time and effort are expended efficiently instead of being wasted. At the same time, predictability can improve your leads, pipeline intake, and conversion rates, and increase agents’ upselling and cross-selling confidence, increasing revenue substantially.
Another indicator of better performance is the reduction of churn. There’s always a certain rate of churn in any company’s customer base, an amount of influx and exodus driven by various factors. But by being able to predict where problems are likelier to arise so your business can get ahead of them, you can accelerate issue resolution while driving high-quality engagement at a greater reach of frequency.
3. Superior Market Segmentation
It has been a long-time quest for marketers to be able to identify new target market segments easily, locating the opportunities with the highest growth potential and best probabilities of conversion. HD-CX predictability makes detailed and actionable target segmentation a reality. By supplementing AI analysis with information from outside your CRM’s customer data, ideal customer traits and correlations are revealed, which you might otherwise not have known about.
This, in turn, makes it possible to improve a company’s obtainable market size and conversion rates, analyze data and identify and score segments based on shared traits that can include traits from outside your core CRM. It also allows companies to work out the ROI of campaigns targeted at each segment.
4. Next-Level Sales
Predictability puts your business in the position to anticipate a prospect’s needs, offering useful recommendations that align with those needs. HD-CX is backed with a comprehensive record of the changes each prospect has undergone in the customer’s journey and augments that information with market data and AI-powered analytics, bringing out the truly important signal from the noise and helping sales reps become prescribers of valuable solutions for their clients (instead of simply being sellers of a product or service).
This is what’s known as sales intelligence, making it simple to research customers and be knowledgeable about their requirements. It provides insight into prospect behaviors, how they feel about your brand and what their buying intent signals really mean. You’ll have access to recommendations for saleable products and the next best actions in any situation that encompass previously unknown factors, singling out successful tactics or approaches that might have come up in the experience of peers in the industry.
All of this comes together to make it far easier to attain your sales quotas and increase your sales team’s confidence in up-selling and cross-selling, pushing up your average deal sizes and win rates.
5. Superb Customer Service
HD-CX can make your customer conversations more effective and proactive by deploying AI guidance and sentiment analysis: again, augmenting your internal CRM data with external input to reveal the previously unknown. It can predict the accounts that are likeliest to churn before it happens, and it allows you to improve your first response time (FRT) by reviewing case content and routing the right cases to the right agents. Machine learning models increase first contact resolution by bringing the most relevant information to your customer service team.
The outcome is a full realization of the SugarCRM mission to anticipate customer needs and to fulfill those needs before the customers themselves realize they’re there. The quality of customer service that results can vastly increase retention and turn larger shares of your prospects into lifetime-commitment customers than ever before.
The Complete Time-Aware CX Platform
Access to the HD-CX standard makes the full realization of the time-aware CRM vision a reality. SugarCRM’s commitment to time-awareness has been expanded from the ability to grasp the present moment and its full historical context, adding the ability to predict future events to an unrivaled level of accuracy. A product of the spirit of continuous innovation that animates everything Sugar does, it will continue to be refined and expanded in the years to come. Still, it already represents a defining leap forward in CX.
There are specific steps and processes a company needs to take on board to effectively deploy HD-CX and fully enjoy the above benefits. The team at Sugar is always ready to help you implement CRM products with the fullest effectiveness possible. Contact us today to see how SugarCRM’s new HD-CX standard can revolutionize your business.
