Angel.com Phone-Enables SugarCRM with Hosted IVR
Angel.com and SugarCRM have teamed up to launch the Angel.com SugarCRM Connector, a suite of fully-hosted interactive voice response (IVR) solutions that will phone-enable a user’s SugarCRM account.
With the Angel.com SugarCRM Connector, users will be able to access, update, and manage their accounts, contacts, and leads—all via voice commands over the phone.
Additional voice commands will allow users to
- record notes about recently completed meetings;
- schedule follow-up tasks;
- locate and dial contacts; and
- send emails via a speech-to-text technology.
The Angel.com SugarCRM Connector also offers users a host of contact center and customer support tools, providing users with the ability to retrieve data about callers in real time, thus enabling them to tailor services based on the context of the call. And, with SugarCRM Support, callers can connect to their SugarCRM account via the phone and check the status of cases, open a case, or transfer to a live agent.
According to Ahmed Bouzid, director of partner solutions for Angel.com—who stresses the importance of call centers being informed by Customer Relationship Management (CRM) information—this latest release is similar to the work his company has been doing for years with Salesforce.com.
“Over the last two years, we learned a lot of lessons about how to connect the IVR with the CRM,” Bouzid says. “Instead of building one-offs, we decided to encapsulate the best practices and lessons learned and build a connector that allows you to easily connect an IVR—the Angel IVR—to your SugarCRM back end.”
Bouzid says the new application will not only benefit callers—who will save themselves valuable time—but will be a boon for companies deploying it.
“Obviously there is a cost-cutting component of it for the company that is deploying the application,” he says. “So the IVR, by being aware of who is calling and being aware of the context of the call…can take a call that would take usually three or four minutes and reduce it to 20 seconds. It’s a win-win situation for both the caller and the company.”
And, all Angel.com SugarCRM Connector applications can be designed, built, and deployed via Angel.com's Site Builder—a Web-based toolkit aimed at saving customers time and money.
“You don’t have to install it,” Bouzid says. “You don’t have to code around it. All you have to do is configure it.”
According to Bouzid, Angel.com will soon be building similar connectors for NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, and Oracle CRM On Demand.
“[Those] are the next three connectors we’re building,” he says. “It’s basically the same story for all of them. It’s basically enabling intelligence to be leveraged during the call.”