Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Knoxville TN

In the eight years that Seth Hishmeh has been chief operating officer of USAS Technologies, he’s led the company through five Customer Relationship Management systems. From his first disorganized days duplicating customer data in an Excel file to today’s customized system, he’s learned firsthand how important good CRM is to a company’s success.

“We used Excel to keep track of customers, what customers should be charged, what services we were providing them, at what rates, and what their contact info was,” says Hishmeh, who lives in Louisville and commutes to the firm’s New York City office.

After that first frenzied year, Hishmeh knew the company needed a clear strategy and an easy-to-use approach to CRM or they’d never make it.

“We have employees using the CRM from the U.S., India and China,” he says. “We need a way for our salespeople to collaborate with customer accounts and leads. We also need a way to load lead lists and manage them territorially between salespeople.”

So the company created its own system from an open-source CRM application. It may keep changing, Hishmeh says, as the company grows.

To Love Them is to Know Them

More businesses are realizing how important good customer relations management is: CRM software revenue jumped 13.7 percent last year to $5.7 billion.

But CRM isn’t just a software issue.

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