Reside shines the light on customer feedback with Force.com and Salesforce CRM’s ideas community

Minneapolis-based Reside has been building custom Web services apps since 2001. Growing in tandem with cloud computing, the company now has more than 30 employees building cloud-based solutions for its clients. Reside’s practice includes CRM implementation, cloud integration, and custom app development; however, a particular area of focus is social CRM using the Force.com platform and Salesforce CRM’s ideas community to help clients connect and collaborate with their customers. Although it’s ranked as one of the Twin Cities’ best places to work, Reside’s business “lives” in the cloud.

A new way to build applications

In the early days of its business, Reside worked with a variety of on-premises software solutions, including GoldMine, Microsoft CRM, and Saleslogix. According to Matt Meents, co-founder and CEO, “We built Access databases and software that was loaded via CD. As a result, we spent a lot of time driving to clients to manage installation and support. When we saw salesforce.com, we realized there was a much easier way to help clients—and that we could do it remotely.”
 

Reside became a Salesforce.com Consulting Partner in 2004. Meents says, “We’d been using GoldMine for our CRM, but decided to give salesforce.com a try. The ‘ah-ha’ moment for us was when we switched over to Salesforce CRM and all our synching problems went away. It just worked. We took that experience and immediately applied it to our clients.”
 

Meents quickly decided to refocus the company exclusively on cloud computing. He explains, “We decided to do only Web apps and stop building software and CDs. We stopped selling Goldmine, Microsoft, and Saleslogix and started concentrating on Force.com, Amazon, and Google cloud-computing implementations. We could see that was the future of the industry.”

Force.com and changing methodologies

Force.com dramatically changed the way Reside engages with clients. “One of the first differences a client experiences is that we can do a proof of concept,” explains Meents. “When a client has a goal, we can very quickly build a significant percentage of it—and prove it will work. After that, we can build out the rest in an iterative way.”

Reside’s clients typically engage in more frequent, smaller projects than in the traditional consulting model. “Prior to the cloud, we built out the whole project and hoped it met the business needs and that people would use it,” says Meents. “Today, we recommend to clients that we start with a smaller scope of work, build it, and try it out before we build more functionality.”

He continues, “Our release times are significantly shorter. The environment is already set up, so our developers can get started right away. With Force.com, we can focus on real innovation and developing what clients need, rather than worrying about nuts and bolts. We can get something up in 4 weeks that might have taken 6 months before. Not only do clients save in development costs, but they don’t have the opportunity cost of not knowing if something will work and potentially having to start over.”

Fostering community online

Reside historically worked in the B2B space. With the launch of Salesforce CRM’s Ideas community feature, Meents and company have become more consumer-oriented, helping clients use the cloud to build communities and engage more directly with their end customers in real time.

One of Reside’s more complex engagements was an online community it built for FICO (formerly Fair Isaac), a leader in decision management. FICO wanted a place for customers to share ideas, discuss solutions, and access resources—including videos and other content—as well as download trial versions of its software. The solution needed to integrate five disparate cloud services into one Web site with a consistent and consolidated user experience, while automatically capturing lead data in Salesforce CRM.

Using Force.com and Salesforce CRM’s ideas, Reside built a proof of concept for an all-in-one portal in just 6 weeks, enabling FICO customers to try out the portal and share feedback before project completion. Meents says, “The consumer experience is really rich. Users don’t know that they’re essentially linking to five different apps—they experience it as one community.” In addition to creating deeper engagement with end customers, the community has resulted in marketing and customer support savings plus more qualified leads for FICO.

Changing technologies meet change.gov

Reside was also tapped to build an online community for the Obama-Biden transition team. In the weeks leading up to President Obama’s inauguration, his transition team wanted to directly engage U.S. citizens to determine what issues they wanted to see tackled by the new administration. Reside built an online community—called the Citizen’s Briefing Book (or CBB)—where visitors could submit ideas, vote on them, and review other suggestions.

The CBB was available online for a week, accommodating 125,000 users, 44,000 ideas, and 1.4 million votes. Afterwards, the key ideas were summarized in an actual briefing book for the new president. Recommendations focused on the economy, energy, and the environment. One proposal involving emissions requirements for automakers was signed into law by Obama during his first month in office.

According to Meents, “We developed the Citizen’s Briefing Book in less than 4 weeks, accommodated a magnitude of followers, and integrated with change.gov (the Obama-Biden team’s transition Web site). Only Force.com has the infrastructure in place to get the community up quickly and perform reliably under heavy traffic—all at a reasonable cost. We couldn’t have done it without Force.com.”

Keeping the focus on Force.com

Salesforce.com is making it even easier for Reside’s clients to collaborate in the cloud. “Salesforce Chatter is going to be really powerful because a lot of organizations want a collaboration tool that will help employees be more proactive,” explains Meents. “For example, we’re working with a Fortune 500 company that has 35,000 employees globally. Chatter will make it much easier for employees in California to keep tabs on what’s happening in Europe.” Reside has also joined the Force.com VAR Program, so it can help clients get up and running with Force.com cloud-computing solutions even faster than before.

The secret to continuing success in the cloud? According to Meents, “Cloud services is everything you don’t want to worry about. You don’t want to worry about how the lights go on—you just want to turn them on. The more you can simplify and let salesforce.com—which has invested in the infrastructure—worry about that stuff, the better off you’ll be.”

He continues, “Five years ago we had a broad technology set. We were good at a lot of things, but not great at any. We’ve really narrowed down. It’s like the Southwest Airlines model, which has only one plane type and one kind of engine to service. Maintenance workers and schedulers don’t need to learn about multiple configurations. With Force.com, our developers only have to know one core set of tools, so they’re really, really good with them.”
 

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