SugarCRM believes that perfection in workflows is the key to success. In fact, 75% of all opportunities aren’t closed because salespeople either didn’t follow up in a timely manner, or they didn’t chase the opportunity.
At redk, as product experts, we love to update you on those feature that worth the most. So this is why we want to highlight Sugar’s Customer Journey Plug-in, to boost your sales!
Orchestrating sales success with Customer Journey Plug-In
‘Every day we go through customer journeys’ explained Andreas Schuster, Customer Success Director for EMEA at SugarCRM, during the Orchestrating Sales Success with Customer Journey Plug-In webinar on Thursday, 24 September. Schuster guided us through the functions and features of the Sugar Customer Journey Plug-In, highlighting the importance of an efficient customer journey and explaining how this software can improve the experience for both the customer and the employee.
What is the Sugar Customer Journey Plug-In?
During the webinar, we learned that Customer Journey is a tiny plug-in that leads users through customer journey templates. It’s an extremely useful workflow guide as it is relevant for 90% of use cases in SugarCRM.
Customer relations professionals can use this software to easily design and operationalise every interaction they have with customers, suppliers and stakeholders throughout the customer journey process. By doing so, you can increase your sales team’s productivity and win rate, maximise conversions, avoid losing track of opportunities and more. SugarCRM’s vision is to create lifetime relationships with their customers, and it is their hope that this plug-in can help you achieve the same.
The importance of workflow efficiency
Why shouldn’t workflows be excellent at all times? Schuster explained that efficient workflows are an essential success factor for sales and profit. SugarCRM believes that perfection in workflows is the key to success. In fact, 75% of all opportunities aren’t closed because salespeople either didn’t follow up in a timely manner, or they didn’t chase the opportunity. This happens because salespeople aren’t guided properly with the project management techniques required for B2B opportunities.
Schuster pointed out that another workflow weakness is long sales cycles. In this event, even if you succeed in winning the deal, it hasn’t been done in an efficient way, and poorly utilised time and resources equate to missed opportunities elsewhere.
Customer Journey speeds up sales cycles by automating various business processes, which improves customer experience and satisfaction and accelerates their progress through the decision cycle.
Workflow organisation becomes even more complicated when running a global business with different subsidiaries in different regions. Schuster explained that when these subsidiaries address customers in different ways, it can distort the experience that customers have with your brand and services. Customer Journey uses your existing Sugar deployment to automate customer journey mapping processes, ensuring that everyone at every location is working together and is informed about which actions to take at each stage, homogenising the customer experience regardless of location.
Why the need for the Sugar Customer Journey Plug-In now?
None of this information is new, however. We all know the importance of cultivating customer relationships, so why now? Schuster told us that one megatrend that influenced SugarCRM to create this plug-in is the need for businesses to be available ‘on demand.’ When companies don’t need to provide these services themselves, they outsource them, creating an even greater need for smoother, more efficient workflows and customer journey processes.
Another megatrend is social media. In today’s digital society, we follow our favourite brands on social media and they take us on a journey as a private customer. This makes the customer journey aspect even more significant. The journey
Schuster posed the question, ‘What is the ideal journey we want our customers to be on?’ When you start building customer journey experiences in your CRM, it’s important to define them, which is what the Sugar Customer Journey Plug-In does.
SugarCRM offers a lot of useful features, but sometimes users can be overwhelmed by them. This plug-in offers workflow guidance within Sugar software. It helps users navigate all of the features and understand how to use the right things in the right order. The Customer Journey Plug-In
We learned that this plug-in benefits sales by creating shorter lead cycles, improving new customer onboarding and ensuring legal compliance. For example, to be compliant with GDPR in Europe, claims must be documented in the same way across every market and country.
Schuster then walked us through an example of an opportunity as it progresses through the CJP workflow. In the diagram below, each stage of the journey appears in dark green with its corresponding activities listed in light green below it. Salespeople start with the first stage and work their way towards completion with the last one. All records are saved and displayed below. The Progress Pie Chart displays the completed steps of a journey. Most importantly, the Momentum Gauge shows the current pace of the opportunity, reminding you to speed things along if needed. Finally, the Funnel shows your current journey alongside other journeys for comparison. Green indicates good progress, while yellow and red mean you’re falling behind. Being able to track each journey empowers companies to see where they stand and how well they’re progressing with each customer journey.
Throughout the course of this webinar, we saw the value that efficient workflows bring to a company and gained a clearer understanding of how the Customer Journey Plug-In functions in order to offer that added value. By empowering employees to be in the know and guiding them through all stages of the workflow progression, you’ll build a consistent customer experience by improving inefficiencies and driving faster sales cycles. Watch the webinar now.
At redk, we pride ourselves on our over 15 years’ experience as technical and consultancy CRM experts. Our goal is to help your organisation streamline processes and integrate the best tools on the market to achieve lasting customer service excellence.
