Project of the Month - July 2010

QAS for SugarCRM

Description of project

Verify and standardize US and international addresses as they are entered into SugarCRM. Organizations will improve prospect management, enhance marketing analysis, cut operational costs, and maintain a professional image.

Learn more about QAS for SugarCRM in the archived webinar, "5 Tips to Improve Contact Data Quality".

Trove Info

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

Experian QAS is excited to be a part of the SugarCRM community. As a leading provider of address verification software and services, we look to market leaders like SugarCRM to integrate our products with in order to provide better solutions for the marketplace. Not only are we able to better serve our customer base, but we can market our benefits to the wider SugarCRM audience.

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

None currently.

What inspired you to create this project?

As SugarCRM is the world’s leading provider of open source Customer Relationship Management, we wanted to assist their community in getting the most out of their CRM investment. A built-in address verification tool allows for more effective communications, improved demographic profiling and timely sales and marketing follow-up.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

QAS for SugarCRM helps solve business process issues relating to bad addresses. These include wasted costs and operational inefficiencies related to poor addresses, but also poor businesses analysis related to inaccurate customer data.

We operate on the “garbage in, garbage out” theory. When organizations are capturing bad data, they are putting garbage into their CRM system that will transpire into bad data coming out. Businesses want accurate data so they can effectively communicate with customers and prospects and analyze customer data to assist in business decision making.

QAS for SugarCRM verifies and standardizes prospect and customer addresses in real time, inhibiting common formatting and spelling errors. In addition, Experian QAS helps solve issues with account and contact duplication. By creating a standardized unique identifier, database administrators can more easily identify duplicate records and appropriately profile housing units for more complete market analysis.

Essentially, address verification allows businesses to have more accurate data following in and out of their organization.

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?

Consider the impact address information has on your organization and how many business users touch that information on a daily basis. The impact is often significant. When users enter an address in SugarCRM, Experian QAS works behind the scenes to ensure that the address is being captured correctly, leaving the user experience essentially unchanged. The user is only prompted for missing information as needed. No matter who is entering information, every address is standardized and formatted, saving time and money.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

Address Verification is one small way businesses can dramatically improve processes across multiple departments. There is a low cost of entry and a return on investment can be easily tracked.

What do you want to build next for Sugar?

Currently, QAS Pro On Demand, our software as a service address validation tool, is built into SugarCRM. Experian QAS has many additional products and services that could benefit the SugarCRM community. These include a batch tool to clean existing data and de-duplication software to assist in removing duplicate data. These tools could be utilized now by the SugarCRM community through a local instillation, but down the road, could be more integrated into SugarCRM.

Learn more about QAS for SugarCRM in the archived webinar, "5 Tips to Improve Contact Data Quality".