Cooper Roberts Research Gets the Facts with Entellium

Business Wire, Oct 12, 2006

Marketing Research Firm Selects Entellium to Maintain Personal Connections with Clients

SEATTLE -- For Cooper Roberts Research (www.cooper-roberts.com), a full-service supplier of custom marketing research, a key to success has been forging personal relationships with prospects and clients. To keep those relationships strong as the company grows, Cooper Roberts Research has turned to a hosted customer relationship management (CRM) solution from Entellium (www.entellium.com).

Since its founding in 1991, Cooper Roberts Research has built a reputation as a research company that lets its clients "sleep at night." Not only does the San Francisco-based firm provide its clients with valuable market and consumer insights, it does so in a timely, detailed manner.

"Most of our business is repeat business," said Ken Roberts, president and co-founder. "Once a client engages us, they stay with us for the long haul. We really get to know their business, and they receive close attention from senior people. We're easy to work with, and we have the experience to execute flawlessly every time."

As happens in many professional services firms, the founders eventually want to take on less active roles in the business. To make this transition effective, the company needs to put systems, processes and infrastructure in place that ensure the firm can move forward with the original vision and service premise intact. Such is the case with Cooper Roberts Research, which is looking to grow significantly while keeping a tight connection to its clients.

Given the emphasis on client service and relationships, a CRM system represented a critical part of the Cooper Roberts Research infrastructure, offering a way to codify the company's customer service model, support growth and maintain or even improve client service levels. The company considered a number of alternatives, including elaborate spreadsheets and CRM software running on a Cooper Roberts Research server.

Frustrated with server-based CRM software, the company decided to evaluate hosted CRM offerings. According to Roberts, Entellium stood out from the pack for its ease of use and dedication to customer support - one that mirrored Cooper Roberts Research's own passion for customer service. Every Entellium customer receives a named account manager who manages such aspects as data migration, user training and ongoing support.

"We don't end up in a call queue talking to an agent who knows nothing about our business," said Roberts. "When we call Entellium, we're on a first name basis with the person answering the phone, and they are very familiar with our setup and needs. It helps us to sleep better at night."

With Entellium in place, Cooper Roberts Research is finding that it can better focus on meeting customer needs with the confidence that details about customer interactions are safely managed in a world-class hosting facility and accessible to account managers anywhere in the world via the Web. It is those details that will help keep Cooper Roberts moving in the right direction.

"As Cooper Roberts Research demonstrates, customer service is what keeps customers coming back and enables companies of any size to grow and thrive," said Natalee Roan, Entellium's chief marketing officer. "For us, it's not enough to simply create technology solutions that help our customers provide superior customer service - we have to work hard ourselves to live up to the standard set by our customers."

About Entellium

Founded in 2000, Entellium's suite of CRM solutions has been designed specifically for small and midsize companies and divisions of large enterprises that want a powerful solution that strikes the right balance between the everyday needs of sales and service representatives and the reporting requirements of management. Entellium has won several industry awards for innovation in usability, and was recently recognized by Forrester Research for top scores in Usability and Cost among leading CRM providers (The Forrester Wave: Hosted Sales Force Automation, Q1 20051). Entellium is also the recipient of the Frost and Sullivan 2005 Customer Service Leadership award for outstanding service to its customers. Entellium is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, with a global R&D Center in Malaysia and sales operating worldwide via its partner network. For more information, visit http://www.entellium.com.

(1) The Forrester Wave: Hosted Sales Force Automation, Q1 2005, L. Herbert (with Erin Kinikin and Jessica Harrington), March 31, 2005.