Considering SugarCRM; but first a few questions

[rickt]

Hello,

We are SMB-ish (<50 employees) software developer, and we provide B2C software solutions. Our software is typically downloaded/purchased via our company website.
Our most pressing need is for a replacement for our aging _helpdesk_ ticketing and case management tool. (Cerberus). We normally receive greater than 200 support tickets/requests per day, if you include pre-sales questions, general queries, etc.

I am very interested in creating an improved customer-facing portal for support, in which end users log-in, create "tickets" or "cases" and then submit to support.

But I'm having difficulty figuring out how/whether sugarcrm can deal with this, especially in that we are working with thousands of customers; again, we are not B2B--we are working with end users.

I’d prefer that our support agents be able to respond, within the Sugar interface (not a third-party ticketing or helpdesk system) to customer requests, where an agent types out a response, leverages “canned” answers or knowledgebase material or references a written resource or website, etc.

Again, In the Sugar demos, I haven’t seen how that would happen, or what it would look like. My guess is that it’s something that can be configured, but I’d like to do more than guess.

I am already familiar with some of the threads in this forum relative to the issue of whether a B2C customer is an “account” or a “contact”. I’m not even close to figuring that one out yet. Right now, It’s all about getting useful feedback from others who may be using Sugar in a similar context.

Comments?

Sidenote: my plan is to implement a support system using Sugar (or another CRM, if necessary) before considering changes to our other systems for transactions, office stuff, etc.

[kbrill]

Hi,
We at SugarCRM use the cases and a case portal to manage customer tickets and it works fairly well. There are some customizations that are needed to make it effective but if you know a little PHP and can use the Studio part of SugarCRM it's not hard to customize it to your needs. We, obviously, are using the enterprise version and with the workflow rules in the PRO and ENT versions you can set up a pretty effective and easily scaled help desk with all the bells and wistles.

The OS version would be a little more difficult to scale to your size as it does not have the workflow, knowledge base or reports needed to manage 200 tickets a day. Once 5.0 is out and the new portal is rolled out it will be even more easily maintained and presented to end users.