BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA--(Marketwired - Jun 12, 2013) - SugarCRM, the company that makes every user a customer expert, today announced that Despegar.com, Latin America's largest online travel agency, has chosen to implement SugarCRM Professional Edition to better serve its passenger and hotel network. The agreement was signed in the fourth quarter of 2012.

Despegar.com hotel contact centers, located in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, include more than 300 agents who focus on all levels of customer interaction for their passengers and hotels in Latin America, USA, and Spain. Agents strive for optimum customer service, retention, and loyalty. To deliver expert customer service, agents often interact with departments across the organization including administration, legal, and accounting.

As the Latin American online travel market grew and became more competitive, Despegar.com considered a CRM solution to analyze customers' needs so it could provide a superior service experience, provide more consistent, timely updates to customers, and ensure that agents speak with a single voice to the customer across the service organization. The company chose SugarCRM Community Edition in 2011 and moved to Sugar Professional in the fourth quarter 2012 to take advantage of more sophisticated reporting capabilities for service metrics and customer analytics.

"Our initial use of Sugar brought many benefits to our customer service operation," notes Juan De Carolis, customer service regional manager for Despegar.com. "We now have greater insight into customer interactions and service issues, which gives us a better understanding of our clients' needs. And, Sugar allows us to review our business processes so we can provide a higher level of customer service."

From the beginning, Despegar.com has worked with SugarCRM Gold Partner GrowIT. With the move to Sugar Professional, Despegar.com and GrowIT are developing advanced reporting, and improving the quality of customer data to help Despegar.com better understand and track its customers' changing needs. GrowIT also integrated Sugar with Asterisk, an open source telephony switching, ProcessMaker BPM, and various applications developed in house by Despegar.com. These enhancements will enable the company to:

• Make informed business decisions that drive retention and loyalty using graphical and analytical customer data available through Sugar's advanced reporting

• Automate and measure customer interactions including satisfaction surveys and customer communications

• Gain deeper insight into agents' online resolution rates and response times