Project of the Month - October 2009

SugarCRM SMS Messaging

Description of project

This module enables efficient SMS sending from within SugarCRM to a large number to global mobile networks, enabling sales teams to easily SMS leads, contacts or accounts. A log is kept of the interaction and added to the record history.

Trove Info

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

Intdev has for many years been a SugarCRM partner in an emerging economy. The business often requires going out of your way to providing solutions, often quite unconventional from what businesses take for granted in more developed parts of the world. In our environment, deploying solutions requires understanding a clients' specific situation, interpreting their requirements and providing customised solutions. Our experience from facilitating implementations in South Africa and Nigeria has taught us a lot about engaging with local business communities. These include agility, flexibility, custom integration and often challenging support. The recent popularity of our contribution probably stems from having identified a specific requirement. Of course, we also have the skills to develop and package a solution that works very well.

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

We've adopted a number of SugarForge projects such as Asterisk Click-to-Dial and Google Calendar sync. These open source solutions give our customers means to compete with superior technologies at far lower cost than commercial products.

Our contribution to the SugarCRM community was merely to address a specific business need. There are challenges in local infrastructure, often slow postal services and further high costs to telecommunication. Many businesses rely on the real-time aspect of short message services (SMS) to communicate, contact and service their customers. SMS is ideal to follow up on prospects, confirm shipping of a product or suspension of a service.

What business pain points were you solving specifically?

The pain points are the use of disparate systems by staff; often having to switch between screens and applications to perform basic tasks. The lack of efficiency and further increased human error often started debate about staff having effectively communicated with customers. The solution was to provide a simpler means of communicating through a single click-of-a-button, and further to keep a history of the SMS message interactions.

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

The challenge in any business is communicating with its customers. The simple mechanism of entering into the personal sphere of an individual through sending SMS establishes a different type of connection. The individual is addressed as a person, receives the SMS on their own mobile phone, and even has the option to take action e.g. return a call. The impact of such invasive personal communication is that the recipient is far more responsive to SMS than an ordinary email.

Customers use SMS to inform their leads and contacts of service activations, payment debit orders or even pending suspensions. They use it for debt collection, making the recipient well aware of the outstanding amounts and prompting immediate action. One merely has to be creative with the application of SMS.

What would you say to encourage additional community participation?

It is imperative that the open source community support each other, and leverage off the SugarForge platform that SugarCRM has provided for this global knowledge sharing. Many businesses are equal to ours, challenged by budgets while wanting to innovate and compete with their sector competitors. An individual or organisation should set the direction, and Intdev encourages community members to be more involved with their create peers.

What do you want to build next for Sugar Suite?

We're expanding the capabilities of the SMS communications module to include bulk SMS sending. This will function exactly as an email campaign but merely use SMS as the transport for delivering the message. A further iteration will be the integration of delivery receipts that mark the message as successfully delivered if received by the recipient; and again applying this to bulk SMS sending. Internal integration projects have been synchronisation with QuickBooks, custom reporting amongst others which we will evaluate to package for the community.