What’s New in Sugar’s Q3 2023?

Since our last quarterly release, SugarCRM has made exceptional strides in enhancing marketing, sales, and customer service capabilities by seamlessly integrating intelligent features into our products.

Join us as we delve into the Q3 2023 enhancements aimed at reinforcing current customer connections and creating new ones through actionable insights and intelligent automation. Let’s embark on this exciting journey together!

Improved UI for Better UX in Sugar Sell 

Prior to the 13.1 version, Tile View (TV) only allowed users to visualize and engage within four modules: Cases, Opportunities, Tasks, and Leads. Starting with the Q3 2023 release, we have made enhancements to the TV interface, enabling users to consume and update information in a visual, user-friendly way for all sidecar modules with dropdown values, except the Reports module.

The Tile View improvements list includes the following:

• We updated the Tile View colors to match the Sugar brand palette for light and dark modes. We use the same color from the header all the way down to the entire column for a more uniform, easy-to-follow look.
• Column headers remain frozen while scrolling for effortless identification of records under a certain Status or Sale Stage. You can now scroll the columns independently to focus on a specific field.

• We’ve added Focus Drawers (FD) to all sidecar links on the TV for a 360-degree customer view. When users open the FD from a TV record, the viewed column slides left, and the FD opens to the right. This enables users to focus solely on the specific record they’re drilling into.

• We want our users to be able to consume data their own way, so we’ve added TV and List View (LV) stickiness per user — meaning the system will remember your previous location. If you leave a module and return later, you’ll be automatically directed back to Tile View or List View, depending on where you left off.
• We’ve also added Sort by in TV. Users can now sort TV by any available field in the List View while preserving the same sorting order between the two views.

• We’ve added record count and total sum to the column headers. For example, users can now see the records within a specific Sales Stage and the total number of records in the Sales Stage “New,” including those not visible in the column. With the total sums, users can see the total sum of the Opportunities with the Sales Stage status “Negotiation.” This feature eliminates the need to generate a report outside the TV interface.

Improvements in Sugar Sell and Serve

1. Dashboard Filtering

Users may leverage multiple dashboards, each providing a 360-degree view of the linked records most relevant to them through a set of dashlets. Admins usually create shared dashboards for users to monitor the team, region, or industry metrics or to analyze data over a specific period of time. Report dashlets are widely used in dashboards to gather various types of data.

With the Q3 2023 release, we’ve introduced the dashboard filter, similar to the Reports Viewer filter, enabling you to filter multiple dashlets simultaneously.  

Users can easily consolidate available run time filters in the report dashlets into a single filter group placed in the filter container. Using the dashboard filter group, you can now filter on the dashboard level and see any changes you make reflected in all the dashlets.  

The affected dashlets are highlighted when hovering over the filter groups. 

When using a big dashboard with dozens of dashlets, this feature saves a lot of time by using a single place to manage filters, improving both user experience and productivity.

2. Pipeline Metrics Dashlet 

To produce the best outcomes, sales agents and managers must constantly be aware of their sales pipeline health. The newly introduced Pipeline Metric Dashlet enables salespeople to gauge the success of their team or individual pipeline, eliminating the need to leave the CRM view and create a report, saving valuable time and effort. The dashlet includes existing Forecast metrics and additional ones like Quota Coverage, Gap to Quota, and Percent won to commitment.

3. Action Button for Cases

 In the Q3 2023 release for Sugar Serve, we continue to streamline everyday processes and trigger predefined actions for your business operations, so we’re introducing out-of-the-box Action Buttons for Case:

• Claim. Clicking the action button will assign the case to the currently logged-in user. If the user is already assigned to the case, they won't see the button.
• Close. Clicking on this action button will update the case status to Closed.
• Unassign. Clicking on this action button would unassign (i.e., set the Case Assigned To field to none). This action button is only shown if the case is assigned to someone.

Although Sugar Serve customers already have the option to include their customized action buttons, only a few utilize this powerful feature. We highly recommend that our customers continue configuring action buttons based on their business processes to avoid jumping between applications or wasting time on repetitive tasks. Thanks to the new intuitive OOTB action buttons, manual data entry is reduced, allowing users to focus on customer interactions instead of navigating the system.

4. Improved Case Record View Dashlet

The Case Record View pulls together all relevant information related to a case for a consolidated and comprehensive overview. However, we consider there is room for improvement when it comes to the out-of-the-box available fields and the ones that should be highlighted for the service agents to work more efficiently in the Dashlet.

With the Q3 2023 release, the major enhancements we made to the Case Record View Dashlet consist of the following:

• Adding the Primary contact field in the out-of-the-box layout
• Highlighting the Status field as a badge for real-time visibility of the progress and status of Cases
• Service Level Agreement (SLA) badges are added for the follow-up field—providing a visual representation of performance metrics and adherence to service level commitments.

Wrapping Up

These exciting enhancements empower our beloved customers to glean invaluable insights, ultimately leading to increased sales conversions and customer satisfaction.

To find more release-specific content that you can use to streamline your processes, reduce manual entries, and focus more on customer interactions rather than navigating the system, check the Release Central on SugarClub.