SugarCRM has firmed up its AI story with the launch of Hint, the first service from its new Relationship Intelligence product family. Hint is all about automating the task of collecting and organizing information about individual customers, as SugarCRM explains in a press release:
SugarCRM Hint reinvents enterprise applications by enabling end users to provide only a few contact details (e.g. email, name, company) for an individual and then automatically searches, tunes, and inputs the rest of the personal and corporate profile details for that contact. Hint does the work for Sugar users by gathering and analyzing customer intelligence from a broad range of social data sources so users can quickly and efficiently learn more about their prospects to establish a productive relationship.
Hint builds upon last year's acquisition of Contastic, a natural-language processing startup. It is compatible with Sugar versions 7.8 or higher and priced at $15 per user per month.
Hint represents a first step in a longer journey for SugarCRM, as the company notes in the release:
Future SugarCRM Relationship Intelligence products will rely on predictive analytics and machine learning techniques. These analysis techniques evaluate large data sets to reveal insightful patterns, prioritize opportunities, identify issues and make intelligent recommendations for next best actions in customer interactions and processes.
For what it is, Hint serves an increasingly important need, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Cindy Zhou. "Companies have been turning to third-party data solutions to append the missing information for both companies and their related contacts," he says. Having more complete information on the company, the decision-makers and contacts will help sellers improve their engagement with customers and prospects."
But Zhou advises clients to assess the fit and understand the depth and breadth of contacts Hint can provide. "Is there specialization in their particular target markets, industries or contact roles?"
POV: SugarCRM has chugged along over the years, despite remaining in the shadow of high-profile CRM vendors such as Salesforce and Oracle. It has differentiated itself with aggressive pricing-to-feature ratios, and the ability to run both in the cloud and on-premises.
With Hint and the upcoming Relationship Intelligence products, SugarCRM has made an initial entry into AI. While it doesn't have pockets as deep as larger competitors, SugarCRM is smartly focusing its initial AI efforts on core sales CRM capabilities—its sweet spot—compared to Salesforce's aggressive push to drive AI across every module.
