SugarCRM Introduces Fall 2019 Release

SugarCRM unveiled the new features planned for the fall 2019 release of its platform, with new capabilities focused around self-service, automation, and collaboration. 

The company highlighted Sugar Serve, a self-service portal as the "key" new feature of the fall release, though it certainly isn't the only one. 

Sugar Serve is designed to enable customers to give branded experiences to their customers, enabling them to communicate with customer service agents, find answers to issues, create and track service cases, as well as to conduct other pertinent functions related to case management. 

The company expects the enhancements to increase customer satisfaction and lead conversion rates as well as to reduce costs.

"We are relentlessly innovating on our products," SugarCRM CEO Craig Charlton said in a statement. "We move with a sense of purpose, and the objective of this release is to enhance the experience of our customers' customers."

Other features of the newest release include the following:

• SugarCloud Insights: Designed to provide visibility and monthly email notifications to customers on their SugarCloud storage consumption across Sugar Sell, Sugar Serve, Enterprise, and Professional;
• CRM Sync Dashboard: Designed to provide more visibility into the status of data synchronization between Sugar Market and Sugar Sell, Enterprise, and Professional;
• SugarIdentity, which has been enhanced to enable automated user lifecycle management with external identity provider services and to support single sign-on with Sugar's plug-in for Microsoft Outlook;
• Sales process automation with updates to Sugar Sell that include workflows that help customers automate key business processes, such as lead routing with new business centers, discount approval flows, and automated pipeline reminders; and
• Collaboration via mobile, enabling users to access the Sugar comment log from their mobile devices to add comments, view interaction histories, and collaborate with team members on accounts, opportunities, and support cases.

"We're excited about the Fall '19 release, which follows on the heels of unveiling our newest products, Sugar Discover and Sugar Connect," Charlton said. "This announcement goes hand in hand with our overall vision and commitment to anticipating and fulfilling needs before customers realize they have them."

The newest release of the platform comes close on the heels of the announcement of the launch of Sugar Discover, a sophisticated analytics solution acquired from Corvana, a solution designed to provide accurate, fast insights to even the most complicated revenue analytics questions.

Sugar Discover, as destinationCRM.com announced earlier, will be generally available Oct. 18. Some Sugar customers are already using the product.

Another benefit of the solution is that it will be available directly within SugarCRM, so there will be no need to buy business intelligence and other tools to take advantage of Sugar Discover's ability to automate 24/7 monitoring of CRM data, detect events, while delivering important intelligence to users, according to Richard Daley, the company’s general manager of analytics.

The product goes a step further with Discovery Insights, revealing related facts and patterns that could contribute to the root cause. It also enables Sugar users to go back in time to review history and understand trends and to make predictions about the future.