Velaro, Inc., the developer of the click-to-chat product, has announced its integration with SugarCRM (News - Alert), a provider of open source CRM software. 

Clint Oram, co-founder and vice president of products at SugarCRM said that the addition of Velaro's chat capabilities opens up potential as an invaluable tool for all types of SugarCRM users.

"Live chat from Velaro gives us the best ability to enhance collaboration scenarios for marketing and sales professionals, as well as enable greater levels of service for support and other customer-facing users of SugarCRM," Oram said. "While the combined tools offer great productivity gains for users; perhaps the greatest value is the ability to offer great customer experiences to drive higher satisfaction, loyalty and profitability for our user organizations."

Officials with Velaro said that this integration creates a real-time customer touch point for open source CRM users and provides a 360 degree view of customer information.

Company officials said that with the addition of Velaro's live chat integration with SugarCRM, a number of sales and support processes are significantly expanded and streamlined. 

"With the dramatically ever-changing healthcare market, it's important to us, as a major provider of individualized medical insurance plans for individuals, families, and businesses, to be aware of what our clients feel about the market and how we relate to them," said Costi Hinn, president Healing Wings Healthcare of America, in a statement.

Hinn said that these changes, by and large, are reflective of "Congressional actions and the daily news, and require monitoring - not monthly or weekly - but on a day to day and even an hour to hour basis, so that we can effectively provide our clients the best possible healthcare solutions. Our nationwide network of agents also needs to talk directly with potential clients to assure we are right on target with what they need most," Hinn said.

He said that Healing Wings has selected Velaro to implement and streamline this integration with SugarCRM contact management platform, to put Healing Wings Healthcare of America at the forefront customer service and response in a very volatile marketplace.

At a time when more and more businesses are looking to the cloud for software solutions, Velaro has taken the unique and timely approach to offer application integration as a key feature to critical business software-as-a-service applications including SugarCRM, one of the world's most widely-used CRM systems. 

Alex Bloom (News - Alert), president of Velaro, said that providing a universal view of customer information to sales and support staff is critical in today's market, and the idea of juggling multiple applications in different windows to manage customer data is antiquated. 

Velaro's integration with SugarCRM enables businesses instant access to CRM records in real-time from the chat window and the company's integrations go far beyond the typical placement of a web control being placed inside a desktop application.

"Velaro provides a rich integration by using SugarCRM's web services API to connect our click-to-chat service directly to SugarCRM," Bloom said. "This allows us to simplify usage and control a customer's complete record as they navigate your web site."