Thinking of implementing Sugar, but a few questions first

[Foofighter]

Hi

I am tasked with intergrating a CRM system capable of the following:

- Maintain customer details (contact numbers, email addr etc.)
- In the customer or account section, also maintain a list of customer assets or products they have purchased from us.
- A way for customers to log support cases via a secure interface to log support cases
- Integration with our support email address so if customers email it can create a ticket in the system
- Maintaining a history of support cases per contact
- Possibility to set cases to various levels for example, escalated, under investigation, closed etc.
- System can email case updates to customer from system
- Intergration with Bugzilla to push bugs through the CRM to an existing implementation of Bugzilla or equivalent

This is a general list of things I am looking for. I am sure there are a few I missed.

I know that the system is open source and pretty configurable, but there is so much fluff on all the CRM websites and I want to cut to the chase to see how easy it is going to be to customize a working interface that will be user friendly, easy to use and navigate and free from unnecessary features and clutter.

It will not be used for sales etc, purely for customer information, case tracking, historical case overview and the ability to have under each contact option the ability to have details of the products they are using from us with serial numbers, licence details ect.

Thanks for looking,
Gian

[longreach]

Would recommend you make a few changes to the Software Bugs module in Sugar to meet your bug tracking needs, rather than linking to Bugzilla. Will make your client data more integrated, easier for clients to file bugs, and more supportable and extensible (bugzilla code is rather less pleasant to work on than Sugar code).

Other wise SugarCRM, and/or its derivatives and add-ons, can do all you are asking of it.

[Foofighter]

Thanks longreach

I have downloaded the software and are playing with it as I type.

Might eb back for further questions and suggestions and see how it is going to pan out.

Again, thanks for the quick reply.
Gian

[Foofighter]

Hi

So far I have been playing quite a bit.

I did run into a few snags though...

The first one is that my autoresponse does not seem to be working at all. I do however get notification emails of assigned cases etc.

The second thing is the main one. So the CE edition does not come with a customer self service portal. Can anyone help me or point me in a direction of an easy to implement and prefebaly free customer self service portal solution with SugarCRM version 5?

Functionality wise it would be great to have a feature whereby customers can decide to make it a private submission, which means other customer will not see this ticket when they look at cases that has been opened already, or public which means that they can all see details of the issue.

Oh, and we are not going to integrate with Bugzilla anymore... so that is a good thing.

Thanks,
Gian