Sage CRM 2023 R1: UX Improvements – The Company Narrative

The feature generates a simple synopsis of the interactions with a company as a narrative summary. This feature allows a user to click a button and have a short report generated that acts as a one-page executive summary for the user. By presenting the key information about a company as a narrative it becomes more memorable, persuasive, and engaging than data alone.

This is the first time we have made use of any form of AI within the product. The descriptive text is generated by a set of deterministic AI algorithms. While the generated phrases are not indistinguishable from a human-created story it is close enough to be considered “near-natural language.”

The Company Narrative is divided into a series of stories. These stories provide an easy-to-read digest of essential information about large amounts of sales, customer service, and communication data.

• The company story
• The address story
• The communication story
• The commercial story
• The customer care story
• The relationship story

The company story explains which user manages the company and to whom they report (if this is defined). The user details will have hyperlinks to allow quick contact via email and phone. If the company team feature is used, then the narrative will tell the reader how many others are helping manage the company. The narrative includes the company’s City location with a link to other addresses. It provides the default contact for the company (and their Job Title) with a hyperlink to the person’s record and shows a count of other contacts at the company. The hyperlink to the default person also has a tooltip to provide their salutation and gender (if known) to help with communication.

It shows the date of the last completed communication with the company. It shows the type of communication and how many days ago the communication took place and if it was regarding an opportunity or case, it shows whether the case and opportunity are still in progress or when it was closed. The story shows how many communications are scheduled to take place in the future. If it exists, the type and date of the next appointment with the company are displayed.

The commercial story shows how many sales (and their total value) have been closed with the company since it was entered into CRM. If it exists, it will show the last sale, its description, total value, and close date. It will show the total value of lost sales since that previous sale if they exist. For successful sales it will show the average days it takes to close business for this customer. If sales opportunities exist for the company in progress, the count of them and their total value are shown. Otherwise, it will clearly state that no sales opportunities are in progress.

The customer care story shows whether the customer has a Service Level Agreement and whether the customer has logged any issues. If cases exist for the company, the count of logged issues since the company was entered into the system is provided. It provides a count of the issues in progress and shows a list of the cases and their description, reference, SLA priority, SLA status and the assigned agent.

The relationship story will use data from the relationships tab to explain how the company is linked to other entities. It shows the relationship, the entity (company, person, case) and the related note.

The Company Narrative complies with the security policies implemented in Sage CRM to tailor the generated summary to each user. The feature will only be available in English for 2023R1, but if positively received, Sage will localize it and provide it in German, French, and Spanish from 2023 R2.

Source: https://www.sagecity.com/sage-global-solutions/sage-crm/b/sage-crm-hints-tips-and-tricks/posts/sage-crm-2023-r1-ux-improvements—the-company-narrative