Editor’s Note: When a company announces a new client contract, the announcements that flood the press wires always talk about the new agreement and what’s to expect going forward. But, how often do you hear about the success of a company’s after a customer has used the system for a period of time? Not as often. So, when I came across a case study that reported how SugarCRM’s (News - Alert) open source CRM system transformed a company’s operations, I had to report.

 

Last week, I shared some information about a case study involving open source CRM provider SugarCRM assisting Tacamor, a provider of nearshoring call center services based in Newfoundland.

 

After explaining the “why” in Tacamor’s decision to deploy an assisting service to improve its call center, let’s focus on “how” SugarCRM’s systems increased the Newfoundland company’s success.

 

Jim Love, managing partner at Performance Advantage, said that Tacamor turn to SugarCRM and a Toronto, Canada-based consulting firm, to invoke a system that specializes in assisting clients with constructing virtual call centers.

 

One of the main selling points in SugarCRM’s open source CRM system was the ease of installation and maintenance. For a company located in Newfoundland, an untraditional spot for a call center hub, the simplier the set up and up keep, the more attractive the product.

 

“Getting to Newfoundland isn’t the most direct trip in the world,” Love said, “but that didn’t prove an issue. We never had a single employee on site. The guys from another vendor kept asking us when we were going to come out. I kept telling them ‘we’re not.’ At first they were skeptical.”

 

While he may joke about people’s reactions to running a virtual, Web-based business, he’s very serious about his intent with the company and its overall execution of his end goal.

 

 “Performance Advantage doesn’t just talk about the advantages of a web based enterprise—we live our vision of the virtual enterprise,” Love said. “And Sugar CRM is a big part of that vision.”

 

Complete in just five hours, Tacamor’s old CRM product was out, and SugarCRM’s product was in.

 

Now, with Sugar Professional is used by over 60 Tacamor employees, serving clients that store customer records ranging from just a few hundred to one client who has tens of thousands. 

 

“It’s got to be scalable and it needs to be flexible,” said Ken Hann, CEO of Tacamor, adding that every client wants to be able to do something different, so as an outsourcer, you need to have something flexible enough to match those needs.

 

According to Hann, the implementation of SugarCRM was such a benefit for its intuitiveness and ease of use for the Tacamor users.

 

Tacamor officials said that the new SugarCRM system has benefitted the IT staff as well.

 

“Access to highly certified IT engineers is limited in a rural area,” company officials said, “so we needed a solution our small IT staff could maintain.”

 

“SugarCRM and ShoreTel (News - Alert) have provided us with an afford­able, flexible call center infrastructure,” Hann said. “What was once only fair game for enterprises has now become accessible to SMBs thanks to solutions such as these.”