Anyone thinking of buying Sugar read this

[adgen]

Copied from the case I started

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I'm close to my renewal date - I wanted to talk to a salesperson about our new contract - i've sent 3 emails to the person who sent my renewal notice(name removed), and copied in the original salesman(name removed), but I have had no response at all. I'm sure someone in the company must be intersted in getting and keeping customers, could you please find one of those people and ask them to respond to me?
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Pretty annoying having to chase salespeople to buy a product, what's going on?

Be warned, if you do buy Sugar, the support/communication is not very good. In the software there are bugs that may stop you from using the advertised funcionality. The best you can hope for is that sugar record it as a bug - forget actually getting the thing to work or taking any action to keep you happy. Also it will take them 2 days to tell you that.

If you need a reliable business system, that works as advertised, with professional support, Sugar is not for you. If you have a full time IT guy who can look after it then go for it - if not then make sure you check all the funcionality you need before you buy. I had to set up 2 extra systems in excel and access to fill the gaps left by sugar, even though what I wanted was advertised clearly as included.

[salesagility]

I can sympathise with much of what you write ... but suggest that it's pretty much par for the course.

If you want real customer service ... grab the Community Edition and partner with a company that competes on quality of service, not on the basis that they have you by the short and curlies.

That's the fundamental difference between Open Source and Proprietary software.... lock in or freedom.

Sugar Pro & Ent ARE NOT Open Source. They are conventionally licensed proprietary software products.

[salesagility]

Oh and I understand that SalesForce.com in MUCH worse .... unless you're waving substantial amounts of license money at them.

Small customers and big suppliers ... t'was always thus

[longreach]

You would rather expect the sf.com and NetSuites of this world to be worse - and SugarCRM to be better - as at least with SugarCRM the client has the source code, and services like custom development are therefore competitive goods, not subject to vendor lock-in as they are with sf.com etc..

[cjsharma]

Hi Adgen -

Thank you for your post. As the Customer Advocate Manager, I need to be fully aware of situations such as yours, as I do take any lack of response from any of my reps very seriously. I have spoken to your Customer Advocate and she has already replied to your email. My understanding is that you have a couple of questions on your upgrade, and she will be working within Sugar to make sure you get the correct answers. She is typically very responsive, so we will work together to determine what happened and how to make sure this does not happen again. If you have any questions or need to contact me further, I can be reached at csharma@sugarcrm.com.

Best regards,

Christine Sharma
Manager, Customer Advocacy
SugarCRM

[sapmin]

Everyone reading this should realize that SugarCRM, like other companies isn't perfect. The difference that we found before we signed up as a partner, is the people! The people at SugarCRM care and they pay attention. How many other companies monitor their message boards and jump in to be sure an issue is addressed.

Absolutely read this.