What Is No Touch Information Management—And What Does It Mean for You?
By now, there’s a good chance you’ve heard all about the “new” Sugar. Our company has firmly moved into the realm of customer experience (CX), and we couldn’t be more excited.
SugarCRM is now Sugar Sell.
Salesfusion is now Sugar Market.
And the all-new Sugar Serve includes an entire suite of solutions especially for customer service professionals.
All of these changes are leading us toward some big plans for the months and years ahead. Namely, we’re working to create a world where companies can easily cultivate customers for life by anticipating and fulfilling needs—before people even realize they have them.
I know what you’re probably thinking:
Wow, that sounds ideal. But isn’t it a little far-reaching?
Well, yes—and no.
You see, we didn’t just randomly pick a lofty goal that might be achievable. We’ve actually built our technology around it. It all starts with our three pillars—the unique features that make Sugar different from anything else available today.
One of the most important pillars for our users is Sugar’s No-Touch Information Management. So today, we’re going to take a look at this critical capability and what it means for you.
What Is No-Touch Information Management?
Put simply: No-Touch Information Management ensures you get all of the customer data you need, without having to spend your time on endless manual updates and entries.
To understand what I mean, consider the typical customer relationship management (CRM) software or system.
In a traditional setup, there’s an account for each customer that includes basics such as name, title, company and industry. As employees learn more about an individual, the account gets updated—whether that means adding notes from a recent conversation or entering job details after a new promotion.
But sometimes, those updates get lost. Either they don’t get saved and mapped correctly, or they’re entered in a way that makes them nearly impossible for other users to locate at a later date. Over time, these additions become a jumble of different data points that can’t be easily searched and don’t give you a 360-degree view of your customer.
As a result, staff starts to spend more and more time doing additional research. They use Google alerts to stay updated on company news, scour social media feeds for recent activity and turn to industry publications to see the latest news. Sometimes they add this information to CRM; many times they don’t. And in some instances, users abandon CRM altogether.
Meanwhile, customer accounts become filled with data that’s old, incomplete or flat-out wrong. And so the cycle continues.
Many teams have become so accustomed to doing things this way, they may not realize there’s a far better solution. No-Touch Information Management eliminates the need for these processes by gathering and entering customer data for you—so you can get laser-focused on creating outstanding marketing, selling and customer service experiences.
Why You Need This Data Entry Alternative
With the above scenario in mind, imagine what it would be like to open an account and instantly see all the information you need—down to the customer’s latest social media post and email communication. Best of all, you didn’t have to enter any of it. It just magically appeared.
That’s what no-touch information management does. This advanced technology frees you from constantly having to track down information and update customer data, so you can spend more time on high-value work.
It’s a far cry from the typical experience.
Research shows that less than half of companies are able to provide marketing, sales and customer service employees with the data they need to be effective. Just 42% of these professionals can convert customer data into insights that let them act quickly on immediate needs and interests. As a result, nearly half of all marketing and selling decisions are made based on intuition or personal experience rather than quantitative analysis.
No-Touch Information Management is the first step to eradicating this problem.
How No-Touch Information Management Works
No-Touch Information Management automatically captures different data points from emails, texts, voicemails and other customer-related interactions. This data is then enriched with input from third-party data services and artificial intelligence, before being automatically added to customer accounts.
The entire process occurs quietly in the background, as you go about your day.
Here’s the best part: Rather than leaving the data hidden in obscure management reports, it’s delivered directly to employees based on what they’re currently doing. For example:
- Marketers are shown the most common characteristics of loyal customers
- Sales agents are presented with data that tells them which leads are most likely to buy right now
- Customer service staff can see satisfaction ratings in real-time, as they engage with customers on cases
As these frontline employees do their jobs, the system continues to get better at helping them. Staff members receive the exact information they need, right when they need it.
So, back to our earlier question: Why is No-Touch Information Management such a big focus for Sugar? If you want to create customers for life, your employees need to spend quality time serving people—not processes. This technology allows you to do just that. It’s been designed to free marketing, sales and customer service teams from hours of data entry and retrieval, so they can focus on working with actual customers.
Eager to hear about Sugar’s other pillars? Stay tuned! We’ll soon be diving into the details of Intelligent Customer Experience and Continuous Cloud Innovation next, right here on the blog.
