About the Company
California-based SugarCRM is one of the world’s leading customer relationship management system providers, with a wide range of on-premise, cloud, public cloud, and open-source offerings. While the company’s flagship product continues to be its on-premise/small business CRM platform, Sugar has recently come out with a new offering purpose-built for customer support.
The 2019-launched Sugar Serve is part of the solution’s 9.1 release, where the company launched several capabilities designed to elevate the SugarCRM experience. This includes Sugar Sell, Sugar Market, SugarIdentity, Sugar Mobile Enhancements, and SugarBPM Advanced Email Handling, among others.
Sugar Serve isn’t intended to be a standalone customer servicing tool – rather, it is a complementary add-on for Sugar Sell and SugarCRM, intended to equip companies with a truly holistic CX management suite.
Let’s explore what Sugar Serve has to offer.
Inside Sugar Serve
Sugar Serve helps to transform customer service and ticket resolution, giving you a unified service console that consolidates visibility across multiple channels. You can automate key support processes and equip agents with contextual data, which helps serve customers better.
Service Console
This unified console is at the heart of Sugar Serve’s value proposition, fetching and consolidating all the critical information needed to close a service ticket. The service console also provides managers with visibility into the overall status of service tickets, specific agent workloads, and other service metrics. There are a number of views you can choose from, including a tile view for at-a-glance insights.
Intelligent SLA Management
Sugar Serve automatically calculates ideal KPI thresholds and your progress in fulfilling SLAs so that you can course-correct on time. It aggregates performance metrics across multiple locations and business hours to give you unified visibility into progress. Based on this data, service tickets and case queues are prioritised automatically so that every customer relationship stays within the SLA thresholds.
Ticket routing and escalation
Sugar Serve lets you automate ticket routing workflows, ensuring that the right agents are assigned with the appropriate customer issues. Sugar Serve comes with out of the box workflow templates for setting up routing rules and determining escalations, depending on your SLA metrics. This feature is powered by SugarBPM, which is a visual process designer for business process management.
Ready to use reports and dashboards
With Sugar Serve, you don’t have to spend time manually configuring customer service reports or dashboards. These come baked into the platform, ready to use from day one after implementation, for both service agents and managers. Sugar Serve includes pre-built dashboards, 60+ reports, and dashlets at the time of delivery.
Customer self-service
Sugar Serve enables a customer portal that doubles up as an online knowledge base. Customers can look up answers to common queries and resolve those relatively simple issues, thereby reducing your agent workloads.
Security
You can integrate Sugar Serve with the complementary SugarIdentity offering, which introduces federated identity and SSO across all Sugar apps and services. You can control who accesses customer support data and can configure processes inside of Sugar Serve, using SugarIdentity.
What Sugar Serve Makes a Difference
Sugar Serve’s biggest USP is that it supports on-premise deployment, which is rare in the Software as a Service (SaaS) for CX category. SugarCRM users can gain from all the advantages of a connected customer experience offering while adhering to their security protocols that might prohibit data from going out of the premise.
Apart from that, Sugar Serve brings all the benefits you’d expect from a customer service automation tool, including smarter case prioritisation, built-in knowledge management, agent and manager dashboards, and stronger SLA adherence. The ability to integrate with other Sugar applications – for example, SugarLive to monitor omnichannel customer interactions – is just the cherry on the icing.
What We Think
Interestingly, while Sugar Serve is clearly meant as a complementary offering to the company’s sales, CRM, and business process management platform, it also supports greenfield implementation. Even if you do not have any existing Sugar applications at your enterprise, you might be able to start using Sugar Serve at $80 per user per month, provided you go for the cloud-based deployment option.
Ultimately, Sugar Serve enables a CRM-powered customer support environment, where you leverage consolidated customer intelligence, omni-channel interaction data, unified dashboards, and automated workflows to deliver stellar customer service. This, combined with the option to deploy on-premise or on the cloud, makes for a truly compelling value proposition for companies across industries.
