SugarCRM Pro for heavy tech support usage

[jbellos]

Our company is considering SugarCRM. I'm generally pleased with what I'm seeing, but I am trying to get some closure on whether others use it 'out of the box' successfully in regards to help desk.

To give you an idea of what we do:

We have phone calls coming in all day, which our answering service posts as 'cases'. These cases then get dumped into a queue. The queue will look for people who are 'on duty' and are not currently on a call - if they find someone, it assigns a new case to them (one of the pending cases in the queue) and the technician gets paged as well with the contact info.

The technician can open the case, review their info, then call the client back to help them with their technical problem.

We've already discussed this with the folks at Sugar, and they say this will have to be a customized addition which is fine (I don't expect to buy something that will fit 100% of my needs).

Outside of that, is where I am worried about whether Sugar will fufill our needs.

Does anyone make extensive use of the built-in knowledgebase and do you like it?

Are you using a customer portal option? If so, are you going with Sugar's Enterprise portal, or something else? How do you like it?

Does the system provide easy ways for technical staff to find 'solutions' ? (i.e. a client calls with a printer problem. The technician doesn't know to solve it. They look for resources in the CRM to search for existing problem/solutions cases related to printers).

Does anyone use SugarCRM Pro/Enterprise to 'monitor' their technicians (see how long they've been on a specific call or review all their open cases with other clients other than their 'current call')?

Thanks in advance for any information provided.

[REByers]

I noticed noone has responded to you as yet, so I thought I'd share my experiences with you.

I work for a support orientated software company and we went with Sugar 2 years ago now. We wanted a new support systems to handle 3 sites in Europe and the US. The business iinsisted on a CRM solution as opposed to a pure support desk app.

We went with Pro and then upgraded to Enterprise, with a view to allowing customers access to a support portal for logging and tracking tickets. Due to internal resourcing constraints we haven't gone live with this yet.

Sugar is OK, but fairly basic (out of the box) for support systems. It's core focus is on sales & marketing. Having said that there are a number of SugarForge apps that handle queuing and those might well suit your needs.

I do like the App due to it's open source nature and the fact that I can get customer modules in there fairly easily. I have been on at Sugar to fix the support side of the app, as well as the product handling (which is fragmented and ill thought out IMHO).

I hope this helps, and feel free to PM me of you have any specific questions.

Rick

[salesagility]

I noticed noone has responded to you as yet, so I thought I'd share my experiences with you.



I do like the App due to it's open source nature and the fact that I can get customer modules in there fairly easily. I have been on at Sugar to fix the support side of the app, as well as the product handling (which is fragmented and ill thought out IMHO).



Rick

SugarPro and Enterprise ARE NOT open source. They are proprietary licensed software applications. The only Open Source version of SugarCRM is Community Edition.

In response to the questions posed in the original thread... Joomla is a great portal front end into Sugar and the Sugar Case are really very rudimentary and haven't changed a whole lot in three years. It's not great for support work. We have done some bespoke customisations for a client that did tame timestamping and invoicing ... it's not a huge build project