According to Gartner, there will be more than 25 billion connected things by 2020. It means the Internet of Things is going to be a huge connected network between people-to-people, people-to-things, and things-to-things. It is not only connecting with us more, it is also changing the way we live. Whether we prefer to notice it or not, yet IoT is transforming our surroundings and will keep on doing it.
Now, let’s talk about CRMs. In earlier days, the focus of CRMs was to reduce the cost around customer acquisition, retention, and servicing them. Now, it has customer portals that look after saving time and resources along with cost cutting. It also strives to provide quality of services to customers. Sugar CRM facilitates enterprises by enabling them to build customer portals to better their engagement. Suite CRM is built on SugarCRM community version, which also builds dynamic SuiteCRM Customer Portal.
Blending Automation with Convenience
So, IoT is changing the way people live and Sugar CRM is changing the way enterprise work. Now what if they both work together? This synergy will create an environment of predictive and preventive functionalities that send alert for future actions. Such a system will notify your customers in advance before they face any problem and provide a service or solution to the issues they might face in the near future. IoT will decode the buying pattern of the customer in real-time, and it will help the SugarCRM Self Service Portal or application to include them in the right marketing campaign.
Is it possible?
Yes, it is possible to use ‘Internet of Things’ and integrate it with SugarCRM Customer Portal and applications. The major three components of IoT can generate huge benefits for organizations if it works in sync with CRM. These three important components of IoT that your Sugar CRM solution can optimize are:
- Sensors
- Wireless Internet Connectivity
- Computational Capability at the Device i.e. Data Processing Capability
Gartner researched recently about the drivers of a CRM applications. In that study, the most important attributes were: Mobile, Cloud, Big Data and Social Networking capability. Further, that study says that Internet of Things is going to be the fifth driver after these four.
Exemplifying the Ease of IoT and SugarCRM
Consider a scenario of a hearing aid company. The hearing Aid Industry has become more advanced. Now it is trying to introduce innovative features in their product lists. Examples could be longer battery life, Bluetooth compatibility, noise reduction. It is also introducing products for controlling your hearing aid device through smart phone, etc.
Let us take few scenarios from this company. It will help us to understand how IoT helps in providing services to customers, with the help of IoT and its integration with CRM.
3 Different Scenarios Where IoT is Taking the Customer Experience to The Next Level.
- A customer’s hearing aid instruments battery is malfunctioning. There is a need for it to replace that within next few days. Here IoT will notify about the status of the machine. This will allow the staff to inform the customer proactively and update him. They can communicate with them that the instrument’s battery is having some issues, and it needs replacement soon. It will help a customer to replace the battery, and they will not face any problem while using the product.
- A customer’s hearing aid instrument is under warranty period and not working properly. Again, IoT will help the company to know about this issue. Hence, the customer service representative can call the customer and talk about it. Or they can straight away replace the instrument since it is not working properly and it is under warranty period.
- The customer is not using certain new incorporated features of an instrument because of some reason. Here, IoT analytics will come into the role and will raise an alert. Now the support team can call and ask for a session or training. So that he/she will get awareness of those new features and customer can start using it.
How SugarCRM Takes These IoT Alerts for Next Level Customer Experience?
In all these scenarios, how the company official will get to know about all the issues? That is because a sensor placed in the hearing aid instrument sends notifications to the central application. It creates an alert in the system that there is some issue with the battery or instrument, and needs replacement. As being an open source, SugarCRM can render IoT alerts in different ways with flexibility. These are,
- Company can design their Sugar CRM application to share this data. It can also trigger some informative information that certain features of the product are in use for a single time. SugarCRM application will integrate this information and will send a notification to the staff.
- The flexibility of Sugar CRM will also allow you to render this information in another manner. It also drives the system to generate a service case where the system will register a support call automatically to the customer. The system will assign it to a service representative automatically, who will make a call to the customer to update the problem, or ask for other services.
In any of the way, a customer will be happy that the Product Company is taking a preventive action, and providing service promptly before they face any issue. It will help you to gain the customer’s confidence in your services, products, and increase their satisfaction level as well.
Apart from this, IoT with SugarCRM can also help sales and marketing functions in multiple ways. Real-time data generated by IoT will you to help understand in numerous ways. It will tell you usage of the product, buying patterns of the customer, opportunities for cross-selling and up selling, deciding flexible pricing, etc. Your sales team can analyze the IoT generated data to decide future campaigns by knowing the right customers.
It will help them reduce the cost in terms of market research. This data can also help the marketing function to identify those customers, who are not using your products anymore. For such customers, you can run separate campaigns, or invite them for trade shows and product launch programs, and try to retain them.
So, why wait? Leverage the power of IoT and Sugar CRM and get the best out of your business. It will make the work flow faster and user friendly. This will also stay helpful for your staff and assist them to boost their productivity. If you wish to know more about such future app or share your views about it, feel free to reach us!
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