Telcoinabox sweetens service provider interactions with SugarCRM

Stuart Corner
Monday, 31 January 2011 12:58

IT Industry - Strategy

Telco services wholesaler and franchisor, Telcoinabox, has implemented a SugarCRM customer relationship management system in a bid to streamline its service providers' sales processes and customer management.

According to Telcoinabox, the open source SugarCRM technology will allow service providers to execute email campaigns, generate leads more easily, better manage customer acquisition and retention and run real-time customer reports.

Implementation of the system follows the company's recruitment last year of a manager to research the market for a suitable system. Telcoinabox CEO Paul Line, said: "SugarCRM Professional came up as the only one on the market that was flexible enough to allow us to write our own code and create our own workflow modules."

SugarCRM is widely used to support cloud-based CRM offerings. Users include NEC Australia, hosted IP telephony provider Fonality and Parallels.

Telcoinabox has customised the system to include a billing collection module that connects its current billing system, Utilibill, to a service provider's CRM. This, it says "gives the service provider a transparent view in real-time of customers' billing and payment status."

Utilibill is a billing system developed specifically for Telcoinabox by a company set up for the purpose and majority owned by Telcoinabox founder and CEO, Damian Kaye. At the time of its implementation by Telcoinabox it was the first fully web based billing management system in Australia designed for telecommunications' retail resellers and wholesalers.

The system will go live on 1 February 2011 and will be available to all service providers through a licensing arrangement. It will be included in the business package for all future service providers and is hosted locally within Telcoinabox's private cloud.