Five years ago a pair of software consultant veterans did something extraordinary. Before designing even the first thing in their revolutionary Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology platform, Jonathan Ord and Brad Perry went to work for a large automotive dealership in Southern California. For free. For a year.
“Each week we’d sit together and unload all the ideas and insights we’d absorbed and come up with ideas to make things work better,” said Perry. “Then the next month we'd move to a new department.”
As the pair continued their research, they discovered something novel: successful CRM adoption in automotive dealerships have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with the unique culture of people in different departments that make a dealership work every day. With that insight, Ord and Perry set out with their software development teams to design a CRM platform that would dramatically enhance the selling and servicing of cars, SUVs and trucks across America.
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In July of 2002, in San Clemente, California, FireSocket unveiled DealerSocket, its automotive dealership CRM solution that differed from other CRM offerings in its core design. It mirrored people challenges and wasn’t built to technology specifications that bore no relevance to a real automotive dealership’s challenges. DealerSocket manages the evolving customer life cycle and drives value and profit to every department.
Today more than 30,000 users across the country, including most of the top dealer groups and largest stores run on the DealerSocket platform. There is no commonality to DealerSocket customers other than an energy to innovate their operations to optimize sales and revenues and an appetite to do things differently than others in the industry.
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