With a Salesforce CRM Ideas Community, FICO Drives Innovation Through Customer Collaboration

Challenge

• FICO, a leading provider of analytics and decision management technology, sought to collaborate directly with its customers to identify, understand and address their biggest business challenges.
• In the past the company conducted user group meetings twice each year; managers wanted to dial that up without increasing costs or imposing further on customers’ time.
• More specifically, the company wanted an online system that could be deployed quickly, and would integrate easily with other applications.

Solution

• After weighing various options, FICO decided to implement a Salesforce CRM ideas community. With help from DemandGen and salesforce.com consulting partner Reside, FICO launched its first Salesforce CRM ideas-based environment, the Decision Management Tools Community, in just 8 weeks.
• FICO administrators attended Salesforce.com Training & Certification courses to learn best practices and ensure a smooth rollout.
• The company integrated Salesforce CRM ideas with Lithium community forums, Six Apart’s TypePad blog hosting, Eloqua demand generation tools, and software trials managed by Intraware.
• FICO installed tools from the AppExchange marketplace to simplify processes, including Clicktools for fully integrated customer surveys.
• Salesforce CRM Marketing, with support from Eloqua, lets FICO capture and develop leads, and manage multichannel campaigns directly from within Salesforce CRM.

Results

• The Decision Management Tools Community now has several thousand members, easily making it the largest online community of its type in the industry.
• Instead of meeting with customers only twice a year, FICO is in continual contact with its customers so the company can anticipate and respond to their challenges, create more useful and relevant products, and tighten relationships.
• Importantly, thanks to the Decision Management Community, customers are now able to help each other, putting FICO in the position of enabling the community at large to collaborate and advance.
• Integrated, single-sign on community provides a compelling experience for FICO’s customers and instills a sense of “ownership” in product direction that increases loyalty.
• Integration between the online community and Salesforce CRM marketing functionality helps FICO capture leads and increase sales.