Cowen and Company Chooses Cloud Computing for Every Employee

Challenge

• Cowen and Company, a provider of investment banking, sales and trading, and equity research services to companies and institutional investor clients, needed a new CRM solution.
• The company, which serves clients in the healthcare, technology, telecommunications, aerospace and defense, consumer and alternative energy sectors, wanted to replace a proprietary on-premise solution which was difficult to upgrade or modify, and expensive to maintain.
• In addition, Cowen needed a flexible platform it could easily and cost-effectively build upon and adapt to meet the company’s unique needs, including managing equity brokerage and research sales details, commission schedules, and industry conferences targeting institutional investors.
• With offices in the U.S., U.K., Hong Kong, mainland China and Switzerland, the company required a global solution.

Solution

• Cowen chose Salesforce CRM Unlimited Edition for customer-facing employees and Force.com for the rest.
• Cowen likes how easily it will be able use Force.com to adapt the CRM applications to suit the bank’s needs, as well as to build new applications to support business processes beyond CRM.
• With assistance from salesforce.com partner Tier1CRM, Salesforce CRM was deployed to 250 users in research, research sales, trading, and other employees in the capital markets and equity groups.
• Integration with proprietary finance and trading systems provides 360-degree customer views while meeting industry-specific compliance requirements. Integration with offline reporting tools ensures that data is always available and up to date.
• With help from Tier1CRM, Cowen is building a fully integrated conference management system that brings together key client data and event information; the company will be able to manage attendee schedules and pair clients and analysts effectively.
• Cowen is developing a research distribution portal based on the Salesforce CRM customer portal to give more than 1,000 active customers access to the company’s research reports; the Salesforce CRM content library will help users find the right reports quickly and ensure that the most recent version are utilized.
• Telephony integration gives sales teams click-to-dial functionality; all calls are automatically logged in the application for easy tracking.
• Salesforce CRM Marketing lets Cowen marketers create and manage campaigns supporting the company’s businesses directly from within Salesforce CRM. Different marketing events are planned and tracked against individual customers right from within Salesforce CRM.
• Salesforce.com Premier Support, which includes a dedicated salesforce.com representative, enables Cowen to get fast answers to its questions and maximize its investment with proactive involvement from salesforce.com’s own experts. 

Results

• Deployment of cloud-computing business applications across the entire company reduces Cowen’s need to run applications on in-house servers, resulting in substantial savings.
• Centralized customer data repository helps Cowen prioritize efforts effectively and provide better customer service; fast access to real time data and analytics facilitates management decision-making.