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Nerd > 7 Plugins that would rock my SugarCRM world
7 Plugins that would rock my SugarCRM world
I’ve been using SugarCRM for two months now to put structure to the call efforts on the leads that are generated via our site. The more I use it, the more I appreciate all the work that must have gone into developing it. It’s an awesome tool but awesome things can always be better. Here are seven plugins I would pay for if they existed on the SugarExchange site:
Track Skype Calls – it has the nifty skype integration so that all phone numbers become clickable and let you call the number with a single click. I would love to see modifications that made it possible to track all calls made and give me a separate tab that allows me to see all calls sortable by date & name. That data could then be incorporated into the forecasting and reporting tools so you can see it took X dials to produce Y contacts to produce Z sales. This seems like a simple matter of writing a javascript onclick handler that intercepts the callto:// link and records the timestamp and lead.
Append geo info from phone – Our leads consist of a phone number, an email and a few other bits of information. It would be supremely useful to have a plugin that would flesh out the geographic info (Country, State, Postal Code, City) based on the area code our country code of the phone number. It looks like the NPA NXX area code database is publicly available and there’s probably a country code database out there as well so this would be doable I think.
Triage garbage records – While we’re on the subject of phone number plugins, it’d be great if there were a plugin that used some intelligent algorithms to flag the records that had suspect phone numbers. Right now this is a tedious process of sifting through leads and assigning a custom status of “Bad Phone Number.” Common patterns of junk numbers are emerging though (1234567, 555*, 1111111). A plugin that caught the obvious ones would knock out probably 80% of the work for dealing with bunk numbers.
What time is it there? – Appending the geographic info to the leads is the first step but the cadillac treatment here would be to have the local time at the destination you’re calling. Ideally this would be a field that’s filterable so the net result is that one can set acceptable calling hours and get only leads that fall within that current time window.
Auto merge all dupe emails – I’m really surprised this isn’t a feature of the import process. They have some de-duping capabilities based on firstname, lastname but none based on email (which is a little weird because it’s more likely that there will be two legitimate John Smith’s in the system than two john@smith.com’s). I’d like to be able to have SugarCRM merge all leads that have the same email address. This seems more like a feature request of Sugar than an actual plugin.
iCal feed – Please make it so I can get an iCal feed of the events on my calendar so that they appear in the calendar I live by (iPhone and iCal on the Mac).
Gmail integration – I’d love a way to have SugarCRM search my gmail account for past correspondence based on lead and contact email address and append any communications with that person as history to that record.
My only other suggestion: why not create a bounty system on SugarExchange so we can get this stuff created? I have to believe other people would be willing to pay for these enhancements as well if they existed. Take the guesswork out of what people want and how much it’s worth to them – accept pre-orders via a “pledgebank” style site. Developers will gravitate to solve the requests that have the highest bounty amounts. End result= paying work routed intelligently to developers and satisfied SugarCRM users.
Nerd
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The “what time is it there” thing was one of the very first things I did when I started working on the onContact plugin for the onTap framework. It’s not a full-blown CRM (yet), I’m just sayin’. It’s also not been released publicly… I was hoping to make it a commercial application because so much has gone into it and because it’s so much better than apps I’ve seen selling for $100/seat.
just to clarify, when I say better than apps that sell for $100/seat I’m not talking about SugarCRM, I’m talking about things like AbsoluteBusy.com or officeclip.com. I’ve looked at the demos for both — they’re horrendous. They do this thing where they make some interface way way overcomplicated and then say “WOW, looks how EASY this makes managing blah blah”. And my only thought is umm… yeah, if you’re Bizarro.
Great ideas! There is already a Gmail plug-in called DolceGMail available for download at SugarForge.org. Check out http://www.sugarforge.org/projects/dolcegmail/
add another one to the list:
- a “Do not call” screening that will automatically check your leads’ phone numbers against the National Do Not Call Registry here: https://telemarketing.donotcall.gov/default.aspx
you supply the credentials you used when setting up your account on the Registry and it performs the check against their db and auto-flags the contacts as DNC.
Another feature I’d like to see added:
-Activity by day: a new tab or dashboard widget that lets me see all the calls, leads, contacts, emails, etc that I touched during a specific time window (defaults to today’s date)
I’ve paid for this another one.
Recently I have found this SugarCRM add-on that allows you to record voice messages and archive it as mp3 attachments on SugarCRM without write down the note. I have install on my istance in 5 minutes. I hope is usefull for somebody. (check out: http://www.voice-it.biz)
Another super-useful one I’d love to see; give me a single RSS feed that I can track to monitor the activity of anything that’s changed in Sugar. So all new contacts or communications with any leads or contacts become an item in the RSS feed. Could just make it available to admins or get fancy and make a filtered version avail to other people and expose only what they have access to based on their role. this would be HUGE.
sean
One more simple one for the list: being able to color-code records. Like open-ended tagging, it can be used in any way that’s meaningful to users (denote urgency of response required, value of the deal, likelihood of close, how pissed the customer is, etc). It would be a simple yet extremely useful thing to have when looking at massive screens of results. Bonus: make it an AJAXy interface for immediately setting this on the search results screen and make it a field that’s sortable.