H/Advisors Abernathy is a corporate communications firm that provides its clients with strategic advice during times of corporate transition. Senior professionals at H/Advisors Abernathy are trusted advisors to high-level executives, board members and other decision makers, who provide their clients with a diligent hands-on service.

William Dana is their IT Director in NYC.

Hello, I‘m glad you made time for a brief interview.

What can you say about your company?

We are a corporate communications firm that works with companies around the world.  We provide specialized strategic consulting to major companies.  If someone is interested, they can find much more about us at https://abernathy.h-advisors.global.

Why have you chosen eWay-CRM? Who picked it, installed, administrated etc.?

The company had been searching for a CRM solution that fits its needs and prior to my joining the organization they had tried implementing Sugar CRM, but it never was able to function the way they wanted and eventually the project was cancelled due to high costs.

When I joined the firm, we began having many conversations about finding a product that would meet our requirements.  We took the time to analyze what our needs were and developed a list of requirements for the system.

I was given the responsibility to lead the project and review system available to find one that could meet our needs and not be cost prohibitive.

And then?

I started a process of contacting vendors and doing evaluations of each package that seems to have the features and options we wanted.

How did you find them?

Through Google! Of course.

We tried Salesforce, Sugar CRM again…and many others.

And during this process, we concluded that CRM system must be tightly integrated with Outlook.

We also tried Microsoft CRM products and we weren't satisfied with them either.

And…?

Finally we found and tried eWay-CRM.

What was the story, how did it go?

We found eWay-CRM online and ended up downloading the demo. We tried it and we decided that this is almost exactly what we need.  We continued to evaluate other products to be thorough, but we kept eWay in our main list of systems to look at more closely.

When we had reviewed over 20 packages we decided to start our second trial of eWay, because we had some specific needs and we customized it together with the help of the eWay people.  We realized at the end of the trial, that the product was able to do most of what we wanted and there was no major customization required.

I felt that if a demo version can do this, we can easily customize this software, when it is not a demo to give us everything we needed.

Did you have any worries then?

Since eWay was not a well-known name here in the US there was some hesitation, but we were impressed with the level of support we got during the trial.  We also had some concern about support knowing that eWay-CRM is based in Czech Republic, and not in US.

So, are we able to support you well from Czech Republic to US?

Yes, we were surprised and now we are still satisfied with an excellent support via technical issues. We have no language problems with eWay-CRM support, which combines English native speakers with Czech guys, who also speaks great English.

Your final impression?

We were overall very impressed that we could get all the functionality that we needed at such a reasonable price point.  As an IT professional I was extremely satisfied with the technical expertise of developers who prepared the customization for us.

What steps followed signing the contract?

We just made an initial set up, data conversion and because customization was almost done in the trial period, so we didn't have a lot of work.

For how long has eWay-CRM been used in your company?

A year and a half.

What do you use eWay-CRM for the most?

Primarily we use the system for contact management and Marketing.  We have over 7500 contacts and 2700 plus company records.  We also heavily use Journal for our notes to each major interaction with clients.

The integrated Marketing Module for email Marketing campaigns is very important for us.

eWay-CRM offers great filtering. It helps us a lot, because we send specific emails to target specifically the contacts we want to communicate with as we have very selective campaigns for specific groups.

And this the perfect thing to do with eWay-CRM.

What is your wish for eWay-CRM improvements?

We are not missing anything big. You are always upgrading every 3-4 months and it brings a lot.

Functionally we are very happy. Just some little things.

But overall it is a very reliable and effective tool, which really does what we expect.

What about mobile application? Is it something for you?

It helps us with quick notes in Journal and Contacts, when you are out of the office. It is improving rapidly through every upgrade.

What is your personal story?

I’m the Director of IT here, I’ve been in IT for over 25 years and the last ten years in IT working in the corporate communications business.

My job keeps me very busy but when not at work I love old cars.

I have a Mustang 1965. It stays in my garage next to my 2016 Mustang.

I also enjoy traveling.  I recently visited the Cayman Islands and have been around the United States and Europe.  My European travels have taken me to Switzerland, Germany, France, England, and Croatia.

Thanks a lot for a pleasant interview.

My pleasure, it was great to speak with someone from eWay-CRM again.

We spoke to William Dana,  the IT Director at H/Advisors Abernathy.