Project of the Month - April 2010

Velaro Live Chat

Description of project

Velaro Live Chat SaaS integrates with SugarCRM out-of-the-box to bring you the universal view of customer information. Velaro expands SugarCRM by adding a critical real-time customer touch point that is automatically synced to SugarCRM.

Trove Info

Why are you a leading contributor in the SugarCRM community? What are the benefits that you experience from your involvement?

At Velaro we believe that contributing to the SugarCRM community is a great opportunity to enable others in the community to expand Sugar’s reach with key integrations. The power of SugarCRM is in good part its flexibility and scalability, that in and of itself is a reason why so many of our customers, and Velaro, use SugarCRM.

The benefits of our experience with SugarCRM are substantial. Being able to work with an organization like SugarCRM is a great opportunity. More and more of our customers are coming to us with SugarCRM as their CRM provider. Our live chat integration with Sugar allows our customers to chat with web visitors, record all that valuable information, and tie it back to a new or existing Sugar record immediately without ever needing to leave the chat.

What other projects have you been involved with on SugarForge.org?

Our live chat, click-to-call, and intelligent engagement integration is our first project with SugarForge.org. That said, we are actively looking for other points where we can expand our collaboration with SugarCRM. In the future we know that live chat and CRM will be a point of singularity – displaying different content to web site visitors based on what we know from their Sugar records, offering real-time discounts or invitations to return shoppers, high-value customers, etc. In the next five years I envision SugarCRM and Velaro will work seamlessly together to offer the right website visitor the right content at the right time based on the wealth of information available in their customer record.

What inspired you to create this project?

This project was conceived by a huge problem Velaro saw in the industry. Businesses knew CRM was critical for business, so they had people working with SugarCRM full time. Those same businesses knew live chat on their web sites brought in 20% more in increased online sales and greatly reduced customer support costs. But the two technologies were not talking to each other. This had to change.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

Velaro has been around 10 years and we have 100s of customers on 1000s of sites. The problem we saw between live chat & CRM made us flinch. Customers of live chat & CRM were manually copying and pasting, or even worse – handwriting information from the real-time chat session with their customer back into the customer record inside SugarCRM. What should have been a seamless process of transferring information was actually taking up huge amounts of time by staff making sure all the vital information they received in the chat was accurately updated in the customer record. We set out to simplify and automate that process so all information from a chat session could be sent back to Sugar with the click of a button.

Is there anything that the users should know about those? Something hidden/new in this project? Think of this as an opportunity to describe how it works to a user.

The most important point is that CRM & live chat should work together seamlessly. I see too many live chat vendors claiming an integration point with SugarCRM when in fact all they are providing is an embedded HTML window inside their product. A true live chat & CRM integration should be complete and intuitive. At Velaro we know our customers who use SugarCRM spend a lot of time customizing Sugar with specific default fields, custom fields, etc. We map any field type in Sugar directly to our chat window so people answering chats can create leads, support cases, contacts, accounts, right from the chat with every custom field visible in the chat they would expect to see inside SugarCRM. And we’ll pre-populate those fields with information we gather in the chat session to practically eliminate the work on the part of the person answering the chat. With the click of a button employees can create a new customer record, or update an existing one with the chat transcript attached and immediately sent back to the customer record.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

CRM is a cornerstone of any company that does business online. It is vital that the CRM provider be flexible and open, which Sugar exemplifies. It is just as important that other Software as a Service firms provide intuitive integrations for businesses so that we are constantly working to enhance and streamline the interaction between our respective workflows.

What do you want to build next for Sugar?

World domination, of course.