SugarCRM establishes a customer club. SugarCRM is one of the big names in the CRM software business. Only recently, the company shone with the acquisition of Node.io. Now we see that Chief Customer Officer Chris Pennington has initiated a club. That sounds exciting at first.
First of all, who is Christ Pennington?
As SugarCRM’s Chief Customer Officer, Chris is responsible for SugarCRM’s customer journey – for every part of it. He leads the global Professional Services and Support business units to deliver best-in-class results that lead to world-class customer satisfaction, retention and benchmarking.
He wrote in his post how he came up with the idea of founding a club and – in a nutshell – what has become of it.
First of all: “When I joined Sugar in 2019 as the Chief Customer Officer, I took a hard look at the state of our customer experience.”
He sat with a team of about 10 participants in Atlanta. They put their finger in their wounds, clarified possible weak points and in the end the idea of the SugarClub came out.
SugarCRM establishes a customer club
“So the idea of having a single place accessible to all customers was born, and with it came the SugarClub. Historically, our customer community has focused on developer, technical, and support forums. We wanted to put everything a customer might need in one central location and give customers the opportunity to expand their knowledge of Sugar like they had never done before.
The debut of SugarClub
SugarClub represents a new perspective and direction of what “community” represents, and is far more than additional functionality and content. Our team wanted to create a place where customers would have the opportunity to interact with us, with like-minded professionals, and with partners, while benefiting from personalized user experiences, simplified navigation, engaged advocacy and gamification, and training and certification.
The club’s three cornerstones, Engage, Learn, and Explore, tie in directly with the goals we set at our January meeting. But now they are much more. They are a fundamental guide for users to share knowledge and expertise, access robust training and certification materials, ask product-oriented questions, or stay up to date with the latest technical news.” Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version); Source
More about the SugarClub can be found here. A special club news and event page shows what the members are informed about and what is offered to them.
Our conclusion on SugarCRM establishes a customer club:
Generally a very good initiative. Customer loyalty should also be taken seriously by software companies. Especially if they sell CRM software. 🙂 Just to hope that the barrier to change is generally very high, that would be reprehensible. In this respect, praise for this initiative.
It will be exciting to see if and how the club is kept alive. Is it only for certain countries or can you participate in all countries? What advantages does the club member have over non-members who still have SugarCRM licenses?
Does the club also have or will it be attractive to non-sugar licensees? Will this group of people then be converted to SugarCRM customers?
Yes, these are some classic questions that we also ask the club operators in normal life. Because in the end, the whole thing has to pay off somehow. And, if only for a clearer positioning of the SugarCRM brand. Certainly, the goal is to achieve better customer loyalty of licensees. We are following the whole thing.
You can find out more about CRM and community management here.
Note: This is a machine translation. It is neither 100% complete nor 100% correct. We can therefore not guarantee the result.
