Project of the Month - May 2007

SHINE Live Help

Description of project

Trove Info

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

As a provider of on demand services for open source software, it's important to us to contribute to the open source community and help extend the business applications we support with new innovative solutions.

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

Shine was our first major contribution to the Sugar community.

What inspired you to create this project?

Businesses of all sizes are increasingly finding they must have a website presence that personally connects with customers and meets their needs in real time. Offering Live Support, backed by an integrated CRM application, is a key element of getting this experience right.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

The combination of Shine Live Support and SugarCRM gives sales and support staff a complete view of each returning web customer's entire account history the moment a live help session is initiated. It creates a much more friendly and personalized experience. It's also much more efficient, particularly if a business has long running support and sales processes.

Is there anything that the users should know about your module?

In addition to extending Sugar Open Source CRM data to the live help experience, Shine also allows sales and support operators to create new CRM records like leads, cases, contacts, and accounts directly from the Shine operator interface. This allows users to capture valuable information, such as new sales leads or support cases, and easily manage it via CRM, reducing support case times, improving customer service quality, and increasing website sales.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

We continue to work on Shine, and welcome suggestions and contributions.

What do you want to build next for Sugar Suite?

We would like to continue extending Sugar around web self service support, so our next project will integrate Live Support, Web-Based Support Ticketing System, and SugarCRM.