Should the customer choose a solution with industry-specific functionality right from the get-go or select a more flexible alternative in order to customize the application? For Brighter Business, a U.K.-based insurance company specializing in covering small businesses, the decision was a simple one.
“We needed an application that could be extremely customized to meet the needs of the direct insurance business model,” says Ian Hutchinson, CFO of Brighter Business.
As a result, Brighter Business turned to DynPro, an information system consulting firm and SugarCRM partner, and implemented Sugar Professional to meet its industry-specific needs.
Problem
Brighter Business required a customizable CRM solution to track customer interactions across multiple channels and provide us with an accurate picture of our customer base and replace an outdated insurance broker tool being used for the same purpose.
The solution needed to be highly customizable to allow Brighter Business to mold the CRM solution around its industry-specific business processes and customer needs, which included e-commerce, financial sector best practices, credit card payments, and custom workflows.
Solution
Brighter Business implemented Sugar Professional via DynPro, a SugarCRM partner and technology consulting firm. Over a dozen major integrations and customizations were made by DynPro, including support for credit card payments, 3rd party campaign execution with response tracking, enhanced reporting with Jasper Reports, custom workflows, integration with Ajax technologies to the core user interface modules, and development of an extensive framework built around Sugar
Brighter Business has been able to integrate Sugar Professional with its e-commerce site, allowing the company to receive continuous updates from the Web site on activities including registrations, quote requests, policy sales, and marketing responses and effectiveness.
Customization versus out-of-the-box, verticalized functionality? It’s a decision that CRM users have struggled to answer since CRM packages came to market in the late 1980s.
Sugar Professional-A Competitive Advantage
Prior to implementing Sugar Professional, Brighter Business was leveraging a commercial insurance broker solution to track customer interactions and store data. It was far from the CRM solution the company was looking for, Hutchinson says. “Simply put, it didn’t meet our requirements.
The insurance industry is highly competitive and customer satisfaction is a competitive advantage. We needed a CRM solution that could track customer interactions across multiple channels and provide us with an accurate picture of our customer base.”
After evaluating a number of CRM vendors, including Siebel Systems, Brighter Business selected SugarCRM in the summer of 2007, driven by the solution’s strong price to performance proposition and the fact that it was open source, ensuring the heavy customization that would be needed to support Brighter Business’ business processes.
Due to the lack of a previous CRM solution, end-user buy-in was ensured relatively easy, Hutchinson says. “Training of the nuts and bolt functionality was provided to the end-users early on, which was followed with a usability workshop to learn where issues lay and to highlight the improvements and customizations that should be made to support our business processes.”
Application Integration
Sugar Professional was integrated and customized across a number of systems. To accomplish this, Brighter Business leveraged the consulting firm DynPro, which specializes in ERP and CRM applications, e-commerce solutions, and application management and outsourcing, among others.
All told, Sugar Professional had over a dozen major customizations and integrations made to it by DynPro’s trained consultants and developers, including enhanced security to support requirements and generally accepted best practices in the financial sector, support for credit card payments, third party campaign execution with response tracking, enhanced reporting with Jasper Reports, custom workflows, integration with Ajax technologies to the core user interface modules, and development of an extensive framework built around Sugar Professional to allow developers to more easily create new functionality both in the user interface as well as with Web devices and services using Sugar Professional’s API.
E-Commerce and Service: United Again
DynPro’s customizations enhanced or added an abundant amount of functionality to the application, and has allowed Brighter Business to improve the company’s ability to satisfy customers as a result.
First and foremost, Sugar Professional was integrated to the company’s Web site via Jitterbit, an open source integration solution. DynPro was able to develop an extensive Web service API’s to integrate with Sugar’s existing Soap Services. Leveraging Sugar’s framework with DynPro’s vertical solution allowed Brighter Business to receive continuous updates from the Web site on activities including registrations, quote requests, policy sales, and marketing responses and effectiveness.
It’s also allowed Brighter Business to link the company’s e-commerce site with the call centre. Very often a customer would first receive a quote from the web site and then ring the call centre for clarification or purchase information.
SugarCRM has allowed the history of the web quotation to be available to customer service reps in the call centre, and Brighter Business can now sync client activities on the Web with quote and policy data generated by the call centres. Data imports of lead generation data are also automatically managed and used to generate outbound call activities.
Finally, SugarCRM is also being leveraged to conduct outbound campaigns where lists of leads are imported into Sugar and allocated round robin to associates who are making the calls. “The fact that it’s commercially open was the real paying point,” Hutchinson says. “We’re already seeing that deploying SugarCRM has taken our CRM initiatives to the next level.”
