Oct
27
2011
The Text Message Lottery Game in SugarCRM

Trade show lottery game uses SMS text message integration in SugarCRM.

The job of manning the booth may not be for everyone. It’s several hours on your feet and trying your best to convince others that your product is better. It’s challenging to do something that makes your company memorable in a sea of booths. Instead of money blowing machines, spin wheels, or golf putting games, Epicom decided to build a lottery game in SugarCRM.

HOW IT WORKS
Conference attendees are asked to enter their cell phone number and first name into a form in SugarCRM in order to win a gift card.
 Once they hit submit, they instantly receive a text message thanking them for entering the lottery drawing. The SMS text message integration is powered by Twilio, a cloud voice and SMS communications platform.

Every two hours, one number is randomly selected. A text message is automatically sent to that one lucky winner letting them know they won. The text message instructs them to stop by the booth to receive their gift card.

LEAD GENERATION
The trouble with using most booth games is that it doesn’t capture everyone as a lead. To play the lottery game, people must enter their information directly into the CRM system. One benefit is that you are eliminating the tedious task of data entry from business cards. Another is that people are more willing to give their information if they get to see something cool in return.

INTERACTIVE LEADS TO MEMORABLE
When a lottery entrant replies back to the text, their message instantly appears in the CRM system. The image below is a dashboard of replies from lottery entrants.

Interacting with someone using their cell phone is a more personal way to communicate than exchanging business cards. Epicom has had a lot of fun playing the SMS Lottery Game at all of the conferences we have been at this past year. It has been a great way to engage with people, show off what we do, and capture that data directly in our CRM system.

For more information on Epicom’s SMS Lottery Game in SugarCRM or to see other uses for text message integration in your CRM system, email us at info@epicom.com.

Oct
14
2011
Bridging Conference Calls in SugarCRM

Quit the dialing and let your conference bridge call you.

Meetings are a funny thing. People schedule them, come up with an agenda, stick it on the calendar, and set reminders. A lot of planning goes into a single conference call, but attendees still dial in late. It could be because they had a previous call that ran long, they got caught-up sending out emails, or just took too long to filter through emails to find the dial-in number.

The variable to be adjusted seems clear. Eliminate the dialing.

To solve this problem internally and for customers, Epicom built a conference bridging feature into the Activities module in SugarCRM. By integrating Twilio, a cloud communications platform for voice and SMS applications, Epicom was able to automate the physical act of dialing-in for a conference call.

THE CONCEPT
The conference bridging system enables SugarCRM users to schedule a conference call the same way they would log a call or in Sugar. The user sets the time and date, sets a reminder “X” minutes before, chooses the account related to the call and the contacts who will be on the call. The idea behind logging a call is to keep historic data of your activities and to also keep you on track with setting up those tasks.

HOW IT WORKS
The conference bridging system takes logging a call one large leap forward. At the time of the conference, the phone for each contact scheduled for the call will be dialed automatically. When the contact answers the phone they will hear an automated voice say “press one to join the conference”. Once the contact presses one, they will be bridged into a call with the other contacts who were scheduled on the call in Sugar.

When scheduling the call, the user can search through the contacts already in the CRM system or add in phone numbers separately.

On the backend, the Twilio integration pulls the phone number field to dial out to these contacts and bridges each phone together.

The conference bridging system brings additional value to logging a call in SugarCRM. Users can now have automated execution of those scheduled calls.

For more information about the conference bridging system, contact info@epicom.com or call 512-481-9000.

Sep
27
2011
Upcoming Conferences to Close Out 2011

Mark Your Calendar: Conferences for Marketing, Sales, and Technology
There are a number of different conferences we would like our customers to keep in mind when planning the 4th quarter. Below are a few events hosted by our business partners and customers that take place all around the country. Epicom will be participating in some of the events as a speaker and exhibitor and highly recommend stopping by!

Schipulcon: Houston – October 6th-7th

Join Epicom customer, Schipul, at the engaging hands on business, creative and marketing training at SchipulCon (www.schipulcon.com) on October 6th – 7th.

Brush up on sales skills, refine your relationship management tactics, grow your business and play with cool technology with over 200 attendees at SchipulCon (www.schipulcon.com).  Speakers include the founder of Drupal (Dries Buytaert), craft beer brewers, neuroscientists, entrepreneurs and more – let’s fill that brain!

Create. Profit. Reach.  Connect extraordinary thinking, networking and hands on play to business success with your new friends at SchipulCon on October 6th – 7th, 2011 in Houston, TX.

Use the handy $25 discount code:  epicomrocks

DemoGala: Denver – October 14th

Epicom will have a booth and will be speaking at DEMOgala 2011.  Organized by the Colorado Technology Association, the 7thAnnual DEMOgala Conference will be at the Sheraton Downtown Denver, Colorado on October 14th from 7am-7pm.

DEMOgala is the largest annual technology conference in Colorado – a one day showcase and innovation conference that brings technology companies and technology professionals together to share expert insight on the influence of technology.

We hope to see you at this special Colorado event and are asking you to please go to www.DEMOgala.com to register today.  Colorado is home to a vibrant technology industry and DEMOgala provides a peek into the innovative spirit that propels our industry.  Epicom and partner SugarCRM will be exhibiting at the event. Epicom President, Bill Harrison will also be speaking on industry trends and the new face of CRM. For details on the presentation Click Here.

Visit www.DEMOgala.com – Early bird pricing ends Sep 30th!

InnoTech: Austin – October 20th

InnoTech is the region’s largest business to business technology conference and expo and includes more than 45 conference sessions. Epicom will be among the more than 90 exhibitors showcasing technology products and solutions.

Join us in Austin on October 20th at booth #512. Stop by to see SugarCRM demonstrations and to win Amazon gift cards in our SMS drawing. We only have a handful of free passes. Contact us today to be our guest at InnoTech!

Elevate 2011: Atlanta – Novemeber 14th-16th

Elevate 2011, Pardot’s annual user and customer conference, brings together users, partners and experts to share marketing and sales automation best practices.

Elevate is loaded with two days of strategy and product presentations and will provide you with tactics that you can take back to your organization and implement immediately.

  • Discuss the product roadmap, hear about upcoming features, and take part in new feature demos
  • Share best practices from marketing automation experts
  • Network with marketing automation experts
  • Experience Atlanta nightlife in the fall

A sampling of the 20+ 2011 sessions:

  • Creating a Marketing Function From the Ground Up
  • Top 10 Tips the Pardot Support Team Wants You To Know
  • Crafting a Landing Page Engine with Pardot & WordPress
  • Jedi Mind Tricks for Marketers
  • Killer Drip Campaigns
  • How To Build an Inbound Marketing Machine
  • White Boarding Session: Successful Scoring & Nurturing
  • 5 Ways to Take Pardot to the Next Level
  • Saving Time and Money with Creative Automations
  • Successful client case studies
  • The Pardot Roadmap
  • More tips on How Pardot Uses Pardot for sales and marketing (last year’s most popular sessions!)

For more information about the upcoming events or to register, email amanda@epicom.com or visit our events page by clicking HERE.

Sep
14
2011
Multi-Location Appointment Scheduler in SugarCRM

Search by Zipcode and Hours Open with the Advanced Appointment Scheduler.

For companies and retail shops with several locations, booking meetings in SugarCRM may not suffice. Epicom enhanced the meetings module and built an appointment scheduler for a customer needing to book retail and fitting appointments in SugarCRM.

The appointment scheduler searches on stores within a 250 mile radius of the desired zipcode. Each store’s hours are shown and the system restricts booking appointments if the store is closed for holidays or maintenance. To book an appointment for a customer, the sales associate enters the desired zipcode. The closest stores are then displayed and the sales associate can see what times are already booked, and which are available.

After selecting the most convenient store location, the sales associate can choose a time, date, and appointment type. The scheduler will show what times are available and will block times that are currently booked or if the store is closed.

After clicking the “confirm appointment and save” button, the appointment is displayed in the Activities subpanel of the customer’s record in SugarCRM. After the appointment is over, the sales associate simply marks the appointment as closed. The appointment status then changes from “planned” to “held” and is moved to the record’s History subpanel in SugarCRM.

The advanced appointment scheduler is an ideal solution for call center environments, retail stores, health centers, auto shops, salons, or any business booking appointments for services.

To discuss how your company could use Epicom’s advanced appointment scheduler, contact us at 512-481-9000 or email info@epicom.com.

Sep
12
2011
Filter Results in the History Subpanel in SugarCRM
Always searching for something – even in search results?  

Each day I search on hundreds of items. This could be anything from Google search to searching emails to searching records in our SugarCRM system. Picking that key search term is critical to getting the most relevant results. Often, I find myself searching through the search results or further filtering to really get what I need.

In SugarCRM, there is a global search feature that finds your key search term in standard and custom modules. Users can search through different modules such as Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Notes, etc.

Depending on the search term, the global search may bring back too many results – requiring the user to filter through the search results.

One of Epicom’s customers needed the ability to search through the History subpanel within Accounts. The History subpanel includes all calls, meetings, notes, tasks, and emails associated with a particular Account. The customer needed the ability to more directly search on these activities within a particular Account so that all results were relevant and less time was spent filtering through search results.

Epicom built a search feature into the History subpanel and added a search bar at the top of the subpanel.

Once a search term is entered, the history subpanel instantly brings back the activities that include the search term and are associated with that Account.

In addition to Accounts, the subpanel search bar can be added to other modules such as Contacts, Opportunities, Leads, etc.

With the search enhancement to the history subpanel in place, the customer can more quickly search through entire emails, calls, and other activities directly associated within the desired Account.

If you have any questions, or for more information on subpanel filters in SugarCRM, contact us at info@epicom.com or call 512-481-9000.

Sep
8
2011
Converting the Web Lead in One Minute

Technically execute your lead-capture process instead of doing it in theory.

I’d like to take a step back from writing about specific customization or integration work our team has done in SugarCRM. I enjoy learning about the different solutions we’ve given our customers and it blows me away to see the creativity of our engineering team and their ability to be business minded in their consulting, then take that and build a technical solution for it.

I write about these solutions a ton. But what led to the problem? What led to the company realizing there was a problem?

I had a few house guests this past weekend and one of them locked her keys in the car. Being that it was Labor Day, I wasn’t sure what kind of response we would get from locksmith companies. First thing I Googled was “cheap car locksmith in Austin, TX”. The first company in the sponsored link area had a headline of “$15 locksmith service” This sounded too good to be true, but what the heck… I couldn’t pass it up even if there was a catch in the deal.

Once on the company’s website, they had a large promotion for 15% off if I contacted them through the form on their site. I thought, OK, I’ll play this game for bit. I filled out the form, left a phone number, email, and explained the issue.

Now we wait.
5 minutes. 10 minutes. 20 minutes go by.

No call or even an auto responder email. I found this very strange. Working with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and marketing its value to other businesses, I thought – surely they have a backend system in place to support their desire to have service requests come through the website. But there was nothing!

I already had drawn out in my mind the architecture of what the process should look like:

  1. Person fills out the form on the website.
  2. Information pushes through as a lead in the CRM system.
  3. Auto responder email and text message are sent to the contact info provided in the form to instantly let the person know they’ve been heard. This keeps people like me from moving down the list of search results in Google and onto the next “$15 locksmith service” headline that catches my eye.
  4. CRM system notifies service man scheduled to be on call that day and is closest to the person’s location. This notification is an email, text message, or text-to-speech message in an automated phone call to ensure the service man is reached on holiday weekends such as Labor Day.
  5. Service man knows someone is waiting and they can immediately call them and get on their way.

 

Estimated time from form completion to service man’s call = 1 minute

If I had been called back within a minute I wouldn’t have cared what the cost was. I would have been happy with the quick response and felt that they really wanted my business.

In actuality, they didn’t have a process in place. I ended-up calling another company. I could have just called them, but the principle of it didn’t sit well with me.

The point of my rant is this – there are too many other companies doing the same thing out there to have slow response time and lack customer service. No matter what your company’s process is to win business – just make sure you have one that works technically and not in theory.

It’s been three days since I contacted the company through its website. No response yet.

Aug
18
2011
Export Wizard for Campaign Lists

Managing more than the email campaign.

Campaigns are the theme and big picture of a marketer’s tactical efforts. It’s what email messages, blog posts, promotions, webcasts, conferences, advertising, and lead source are all tied to. One reason for a campaign is to have synergy among different marketing tactics so that each support one another in order to have a greater impact. Another reason for a campaign is to better report ROI. SugarCRM has a Campaigns module for reporting, tracking email campaigns, and building target lists.

Building Target Lists in Campaigns
SugarCRM enables users to set up target lists within the Campaigns module. These lists are composed of all the leads or contacts that you want to contact (or target) in your campaign. You can build target lists as seed, suppression by email, suppression by ID, or suppression by domain name. A seed list is who you wish to target and a suppression list removes any contact that may be on the seed list. For example, you may have a campaign that targets every contact in Texas. But you may not want competitors in Texas getting that email, so you can build a suppression list to remove any email that ends with “@competitorname.com”.

Sugar allows you to export the individual seed or suppression lists. However, out-of-the-box, there is no way to export a target list with the suppression lists applied. Once you send an email using the target list, you can export the target list of contacts receiving the email. But what if you don’t want to wait until after an email is sent to see who it is going to? What if you don’t even want to send an email as part of your campaign strategy? Maybe, you want to print out labels for a direct mail campaign or some other tactic in which you need to use your target list.

To solve this, Epicom’s engineers built an Export Wizard into the Campaigns module in SugarCRM.

Export Wizard for Campaigns
A new button was added to the Campaigns module to begin the exporting process.

Once clicked, the user is brought to a drag and drop interface where they can choose what fields they want to build out the .csv file.

In the second step of the wizard, the user is asked to select the method of deduplication. This will delete any duplicates so that a contact or lead in your target list doesn’t show twice. After completing the wizard a .csv file containing contacts or leads from the seed list minus the suppression lists and duplicates is automatically created.

Using the Export Wizard
The Export Wizard is a quick and clean way to build and export target lists for direct mail campaigns, call centers that need to target from a campaign. Also, the Export Wizard is great when using Mail Chimp, Constant Contact or other external marketing automation applications that may not have an out-of-the-box integration with a CRM system.

Additionally, the Export Wizard was built to show both standard and custom fields. To enable a custom field in the wizard, the custom field is simply marked “exportable” in Studio from an Admin’s account.

Because the wizard was built to incorporate custom fields, this same customization could be used to export any custom data from other modules in SugarCRM.

For more information about the Export Wizard and how it can be used with your system, contact Epicom at info@epicom.com or call 512-481-9000.

Aug
5
2011
Automatically Create a Contract from a Quote in SugarCRM

Imagine that you’ve just finished drafting up a quote for a potential customer. You’ve done the math, written-up the correct language, and set pricing and quantities for products. You send the quote and it’s approved. Great. But now you have to create another very similar document. The Contract.

To get around the tediousness of creating quotes then contracts with similar data and fields, Epicom designed a more efficient process. With this customization, Sugar will auto-create the contract based on data in the approved quote. A button was added to the detail view in the Quotes module titled “Create Contract”. Once clicked, the Contracts module will open and the contract will automatically be created from data in the quote. Additionally, the quote stage is automatically updated to “Confirmed”.

The benefit of auto-creating documents during the sales process not only increases efficiency, but also keeps data accurate and consistent throughout.

For more information about streamlining the sales process contact us at info@epicom.com or call 512-481-9000.

Jul
26
2011
Twilio Client Powers Epicom’s CRM Products

A snow storm totaling 1.25 inches in Austin, Texas this past winter yielded the development of several Twilio-based products including a Universal Click-to-Call plugin for SugarCRM. Epicom responded quickly and developed an emergency SMS system to warn all employees of the unsafe driving conditions. The message was sent out of our SugarCRM system as text messages to each employee’s cell phone.

At Epicom, we do a lot of integrations with SugarCRM and other back-end systems. One of the more common integrations we do is telephony related and we now use Twilio for those integrations.

Getting started with Twilio.
Epicom started using Twilio on an internal project to be able to send staff members SMS text messages to their mobile device from within SugarCRM. Later on we used Twilio to build a conference bridge system so that our sales reps could invite clients to a conference call using the CRM system. If the CRM system recognizes the client’s phone number it announces them into the conference, and if it doesn’t it requires them to put in a password.

After testing the waters with those first two projects, Epicom saw even greater opportunity using Twilio. We found that a click-to-call application using Twilio would be a good solution for a lot of our clients that had an old phone system that was proprietary and difficult to integrate with any CRM system. With Twilio, we could build one universal click-to-call system that would work with any phone system. Our internal project evolved into Epicom’s Universal Click-to-Call Plugin for SugarCRM and is the most recent product that we’ve launched publicly.

How we built Click-to-Call.
SugarCRM is written in PHP so we’re primarily using the PHP helper library that Twilio provides. We are coding it directly into Sugar using PHP. Click-to-call was completely written in an upgrade safe design and is module-loadable. Whether a client is using Windows, Linux, or any other environment, Epicom’s Click-to-Call plugin is compatible with all of the different SugarCRM platform options.

Our experience working with the Twilio API.
Developing Click-to-Call and other products using Twilio has been pretty easy. It’s a very user friendly API, it’s well documented, and it comes with a helper library for several languages, which makes the development go quicker. The Twilio API is also very robust and scalable. If a customer is using Click-to-Call or another product powered by Twilio we don’t have to worry about the system keeping up if the business doubles or triples the number of agents. It’s nice to not have to worry about those architecture issues for scaling the product. Overall, it’s just been a very user friendly API for a developer to work with.

Epicom’s future plans for Click-to-Call using the Twilio Client.
A few months ago we went out to Twilio’s headquarters for a V.I.P. weekend where they demonstrated some of the new things that are up and coming, including the Twilio Client.

We started working on the new version of Click-to-Call at the event so that we could demonstrate how we could use the product without a traditional landline or legacy phone system. The next release of the Click-to-Call product will be based on the Twilio Client and will be less expensive for our customers to use because it is browser-based.


For more information about the Click-to-Call plugin for SugarCRM or other Epicom products powered by Twilio contact info@epicom.com or visit www.epicom.com.

Jul
20
2011
Click-to-Call Plugin is Released

Epicom Releases Universal Click-to-Call Plugin for SugarCRM.
Epicom’s Click-to-Call plugin enables users to dial out of their SugarCRM system with a simple click of the mouse. Once the plugin is downloaded in Sugar, all phone numbers will be hyperlinked and activated for Click-to-Call. When a user clicks a phone number, their phone will ring and automatically bridge to the number clicked in Sugar.

Epicom uses the power of Twilio to bridge the calls together. Twilio is a cloud-based communications platform for voice, conferencing, and SMS applications.

The product is now available on the Epicom website or SugarExchange as a free downloadable module. The service charge is on a pay by month basis with ramping minute bundles to choose from. Epicom is currently offering a FREE TRIAL of the Click-to-Call plugin. The first 25 minutes are free with the purchase of any size package. The packages start as low a $10 per month for 250 minutes and unlimited user access.

Some future features and extensions of the Universal Click-to-Call plugin for SugarCRM will include:

  • Outbound and inbound SMS text messaging
  • Phone number recognition for automatic access to password-protected conference calls
  • Screen pops of contact records when inbound callers dial a user’s office desk phone number

CLICK HERE to download the plugin or to learn more about Click-to-Call. If you have any questions contact info@epicom.com or call (512) 481-9000.

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