First Advantage Harnesses the Power of Salesforce and Force.com; Achieves 100% ROI in One Year

Challenge

• First Advantage CREDCO, a leader in credit reporting solutions, sought to improve sales productivity
• With each department managing its own slice of customer data in isolated databases, the company lacked a common customer information repository
• First Advantage considered consistency by deploying enterprise CRM, but balked at the steep licensing and implementation costs required to tailor the system to its needs
• The company needed a cost-effective solution it could deploy quickly that minimized IT dependency; remote users also demanded a scalable, flexible system that could adapt easily to business changes

Solution

• Based on an executive's previous success with Salesforce CRM and the promise of easy integration with backend applications, First Advantage piloted Salesforce and quickly opted to build a companywide Salesforce customer lifecycle management strategy
• Administrators immediately saw the benefit of extending the solution beyond CRM to marketing and other areas of the company
• With Salesforce, previously dispersed leads in email, spreadsheets, and faxes are consolidated with detailed history and alerts
• Using Force.com Builder, the company automated a comprehensive month-end reporting system with custom tabs and dashboards
• Force.com custom tabs also monitor the use of company applications by customers and licensed users for support
• Salesforce's Web-to-lead and Web-to-case features enabled the company to automatically capture interest through a Web log and route associated actions to appropriate employees

Results

• In one division alone, First Advantage achieved 100 percent ROI in the first year
• The division has doubled its win rates, increased cross-sell and up-sell opportunities by 500 percent, increased outbound call activity by 25 percent, and decreased administrative time by 40 percent since the Salesforce implementation
• Salesforce has become integral to the company's core business processes, with close to 100 percent user adoption
• First Advantage has gained unprecedented visibility and accountability through extensive use of dashboards
• The new automated reporting system revitalized sales productivity
• Consolidated customer information enables targeted marketing campaigns—something that was impossible prior to Salesforce
• The company has test-driven more than 15 apps from the AppExchange and downloaded four from the directory; it also has one app under development it may publish on the directory