Sugar^ⓇSummer 18, the latest innovation from industry leader SugarCRM, delivers a host of future-focused, intelligent improvements impacting interactions, process management, communication techniques and visual data

SugarCRM Inc.^Ⓡ, the company that helps organisations build better business relationships, today announced new features for its cloud product portfolio that will enable its customers to improve their communication, processes and productivity.

Its latest release builds on SugarCRM’s ongoing commitment to delivering a simple, agile and intuitive customer experience, helping users successfully manage their relationships and grow their businesses.

Rich Green, Chief Technology Officer at SugarCRM explained the thinking behind the changes: “Social influences continue to be a huge driver of how technology for business is developed and deployed. If technology in the workplace looks, feels and intuits like the technology we use at home, the most benefit can be gained.

“At home, people increasingly want to belong, share and respond. You only have to spend a few moments online to see these trends in action. It should be no different in the workplace, and if we want people to get the best from B2B technology, we need our solutions to reflect this movement.

“Specifically, key themes of collaboration, user experience and data privacy have driven our recent innovations and will continue to be priority areas as we move forward. Our customers work in hyper competitive markets and we are here to help them outmanoeuvre competition and build the strongest relationships, achieving business outcomes more quickly than ever before.”

New features include the following:

Collaboration

• Improved reporting – increased the number of reports with well over 100, spanning leads, opportunities, revenue line item, accounts, tasks, calls, meetings and data privacy
• Enhanced visual reporting – 60 of the new reports come with charts that give everyone in the team an at-a-glance view of important business metrics
• Improved report distribution – it’s now even easier to get the right reports to the right people in an efficient and timely manner

User Experience

• Automatic archiving of email – users will no longer have to manually archive emails sent from Outlook to leads or contacts in Sugar – they will automatically be archived to the respective record
• Advanced Workflow: more flexibility in process development – increased flexibility with the import and export of Process Definitions will enable users to design, execute, iterate and perfect Workflows in development and staging environments.
• Advanced Workflow: many to many relationships – increased efficiency by allowing a user to trigger an action based on what’s happening across multiple records
• Advanced Workflow: incorporating human actions into processes – creating processes that combine human tasks with automated aspects or escalations
• Emoji support – emojis can now be used in mail applications and logged in Sugar, enabling more human interactions

 Data Privacy

• Double opt-in – enabling our customers to address the timely and important issue of data privacy by ensuring that data is only collected when permission has been explicitly given
• Activity streams – giving customers the right to erasure of any personal information stored across activity streams

 Green summarises the changes:

“CRM software has developed enormously in recent years. Whereas it was once sufficient to provide businesses with a safe place to store customer data, CRM platforms have now developed into multi-purpose tools that facilitate and encourage collaboration. Furthermore, as CRM software has become more integral to the way organisations do business, users’ expectations have grown too and people in the workplace are now looking for tools that are as intuitive and easy-to-use as the consumer apps they use at home which is why we remain so focused on UX.”

Finally, on the crucial topic of data privacy, Green concludes: “With this Summer 18 innovation, we continue to build on the features unveiled in our previous release, ensuring organisations meet Data Privacy regulations and customers also have the tools to manage their own data privacy rights. In our previous, Spring 18 release, we delivered an entire set of features that not only help companies operate in accordance with Data Privacy regulations, but also enable customers to exercise their data privacy rights.

The latest version of Sugar is available for cloud customers today. For more information and to sign up for a free trial, please visit www.SugarCRM.com.