The Savvy CIO

CRM isn’t just a piece of technology. Orienting your business around knowing, serving and connecting with your customers is a process and a culture. Process and culture are truly the heart of CRM. And it isn’t easy.

But there’s no reason the technology that enables a customer-centric culture has to be hard to use. But frankly, CRM technology has often been a bear to work with.

Most CRMs take a complex piece of technology (encompassing marketing, sales, support, contracts, quoting, etc.) and combine it with a clumsy, click-happy user interface. That’s a recipe for disaster.

With today’s launch of Sugar 6.0, Sugar has taken a “good enough” user interface and made it exceptional.

Sugar’s new tagline with the launch is “CRM Made Simple”, and they’ve clearly targeted the user experience. I’ve been using the new Sugar interface for several months. In short, it’s incredible.

read more »

Every now and then I like to browse the websites of other technology companies. Recently, as we’ve been putting the finishing touches on a brand new website launch (coming in June!), I’ve been doing it a lot more.

While I’ve come across sites both great and terrible, I have noticed a discouragingly common trend. Many technology companies are overly specialized in a particular type of technology.

The most common example is Microsoft, of course. Legion are the IT companies who display their “Microsoft Gold Partner” badge and the long list of Microsoft certifications their staff holds. Such specialization is a good thing if you need assistance with a piece of Microsoft technology. However, if you were to approach such a company with a business problem to be solved or goal to be achieved, you would undoubtedly receive a Microsoft-shaped solution.

But what if Microsoft’s offering is actually inferior or overly costly for your business issue? read more »

We’ve all done it. We’ve walked into a retail store and bought something. There’s a comfort in being able to examine the item, compare it to similar products nearby, and talk to a salesperson. Looking around the store, it’s easy to see sale and guarantee signs. When paying for the item, we don’t think twice about pulling out our cash, check or credit card. We leave the store knowing that if we are not happy with the purchase, we can return it.

Things are not always so cut-and-dried when shopping online.

According to a study done by McAfee, most online shoppers wait one to two days between visiting a site and completing a purchase. Armando Roggio at Practical eCommerce has an excellent article that explains many of the hesitations that consumers have and the reasons they abandon their shopping carts instead of making a purchase.

• Shipping charges that were too high
• Going to other sites to compare prices
• Looking for coupon codes
• Not finding their preferred method of payment
• Confusion about contacting customer service with questions
• Reluctance about providing their personal or credit card information

How can you decrease abandoned shopping carts?

read more »

Deez provides high performing auto racing parts and specialized racing fuels. Recently, the company was looking to take their online marketing and e-commerce presence to a higher performing level.

Highland delivered an e-commerce site to help Deez stand out in a competitive automotive market. The site layout allows customers to browse multiple channels whether by brand, category, or through digital copies of Deez’s catalogs. Catalogs are still big in the auto parts world, so Deez included them as a digital link between catalog browsers and online purchases.

The home page highlights current specials and featured brands along with new and best-selling products. Our extensive experience with auto parts e-commerce sites coupled with marketing research done by Winsby, Inc. informed the layout, matching customer expectations and targeting buying trends.

read more »

We’ve been long-time users (and advocates) of SugarCRM.

Sugar fits within our preference for flexible, powerful, open-source platforms, and we’ve found it to be incredibly useful through the past few years, both internally for our business and as a platform for our clients. We’ve used SugarCRM both “out of the box” and as a foundation for some very deep customization and integration work.

Sugar’s next major update, SugarCRM 5.5, is now generally available, and it adds several great new capabilities to Sugar Professional:

• Mobile Studio: Customizable interfaces for mobile smartphone access.
• Cloud Connectors: Real time data integration from online sources like LinkedIn and Hoovers.
• Dynamic Teams: Add multiple teams and individuals to a single record.
• Social Feeds: User created Facebook-style work status updates.

Here’s a closer look at how these new features can benefit your business:
read more »

Animal Emergency Treatment Center’s Animal Hospital is now open on the corner of Belmont and Pulaski. It’s the first and only 24/7 animal hospital in the city. AETC has operated an outstanding Animal Hospital in Greyslake for many years. Congratulations to Dr. Matt Tompkins and his team.

Highland has provided technology services to AETC for six years, including tech support, hosting and Zimbra. We designed and installed the entire IT infrastructure for AETC Chicago, and will support the systems and users at both locations.

Here’s a spot on the new hospital on WGN.

Ever wonder what the “cloud” part of cloud computing looks like?

It can be easy to think of the cloud as some vague place “out there” where things are taken care of. After all, it is called the cloud. In reality, the cloud is comprised mostly of companies—like ours—that provide web-based services out of data centers.

Want to see the cool, techie insides of the cloud? View this tour from Equinix. (Warning: Video is a bit goofy at times, all part of the geeky cool factor.)

Image from www.equinix.com/locations/tours/

We would have liked to show you our own pictures of the center, but a “no camera” policy is a part of the security standards, along with biometric access and 24×7 security guards.

Why are we excited about data centers?

Earlier this month we expanded our hosted services to a second state-of-the-art Tier 3 data center.

Why two data centers?

As our hosted services continue to grow, we needed more space for servers, more power, etc. By growing into a second data center, we’re able to provide separate geographic locations for servers and backups to our clients who host business critical applications and desire this level of disaster recovery.

What’s a Tier 3 center?

Data centers are rated from Tier 1 (the closet in your office) to Tier 4 (can stay online during a major disaster and last 3 days without power). Tier 3 centers provide extremely high levels of security, power, speed, redundancy and disaster preparedness. Read about data center tiers and what they mean.

Our commitment to world class data center hosting for our clients helps set us apart. Please contact us if you’d like to know more about our hosted and cloud computing services.