Interview Transcript

Our company's a large real estate company here in Chicago, Century 21's Sussex and Reilly. We had a very successful web presence and our website had been up for several years and literally we'd been selling 80 million, 90 million dollars a year from our website.

When I went into look at how we were doing in terms of rankings and results that were coming from all the different search engines I saw we weren't getting ranked very well and I saw that there was definitely an opportunity. I reflected and said wow we have all these sales that are already coming to us and we're not even optimized. So we went out and sought out the best firms we could, nationally and in Chicago and we met with six firms. We met with desme. They're a search engine optimization firm lets see how they show up when I go in and look for them. Put in Search Engine Optimization, there they were right on the front page. Filled out a contact form, an hour later Enam Noor got in touch with us and we had a meeting two days later and that was the beginning of several meetings were they laid out to us the strategies to us of how they work. They had done research on our website to show us the deficiencies and the room for improvement were. The thing that impressed us, is when we met with Enam he went through with us and showed us why we weren't getting the kind of results that we wanted. He went through and showed us in a very transparent manor that if we had had an architecture that would have worked a certain way that we could improve our results significantly. It became clear to us that desme was the firm we wanted to work with on a long term basis to help us improve our web presence, our search engine optimization, and the strategy behind what we were trying to accomplish which was to provide the best experience for a potential real estate consumer that might be coming to look for information. That may or may not be a customer of the firm currently that was thinking about buying real estate now maybe just doing some investigation of houses in the area and really go and see what were the best practices and how could we enable them. We started working with desme we then laid out the exact process that we were going to use to accomplish this. Literally the document that laid this out was sixty of seventy pages. Literally outline all the steps that we were going to take with them as partners. To take from the person coming to our website, how we were going to capture their information. How we were going to take that information and incubate it. How we were going to take information and immediately feed it to our work force. We're blackberry enabled and work in real time and really take and put all these pieces together. Where we could look and say this is really the best that is out there. Also we weren't going to rest and say ok we've created this and now that's it. What would the future pieces be that we were going to try and pull together? We then went and put all the parts together with the firm, put together a beta test, a roll out. Worked with their technical support team and it's really been a pleasure. I think everyone needs to be honest about a large IT project that involves both design and technical and work together and say you know you're going to try and work some things out. Nobody really knows what all the different pieces are and what it potential is you could find working together as a project.

The great thing about working with desme is the resources of an international company you wouldn't even know that a lot of the technical work is being done else where. A lot is being done in Chicago but literally its having people work twenty-four hours a day for you. This is really outstanding. I mean you finish a meeting at two o'clock with them and they say you'll have something back tomorrow or you have it back on Wednesday and literally people have been working twenty four hours on it. It's been just a great great way to work with a team where they're managing people all over that really help us get the work done efficiently, in a quality manor. We can't say enough good things about the process and how that's been working. The resources that the fortune 1000 have been using for many year overseas are really available through desme and we appreciate as a mid-size business here in the mid-west. We wanted to leverage and use the same kind of tools that larger companies were using.

We've been really happy with our experience. We've learned together, we've problem solved together. We've come up with new ideas and ways to work for our customers and with our agents in the office. We continue to work on new projects with desme to enhance our web presence and our strategies that we us. It's been a great success.