True story – A man sat in a café in Mexico when he got a call from his credit card company. The fraud manager tells the man that they’ve detected something odd with his last card transaction. He says, “I’m eating my breakfast right now; call me back later.” The fraud manager is insistent, and asks that he confirm he still has his card. The man is getting pretty steamed, “Of course I’ve got my card.” The fraud manager asks, “Are you sure?” The guy checks for his card, and his wallet is missing. How does the guy feel about his bank now?
In his keynote at FICO World, Stuart Wells described the challenges in the march toward true customer intimacy – not only understanding the customer better, but the ability to act on that understanding faster. Just like the fraud manager proactively reaching out to the customer in real time.
According to Wells, most companies still struggle to deploy the analytics they need to compete because it can be expensive, complex, and hard to deploy. The data is locked in siloes. In addition companies fight a talent gap in analytics, and their own internal cultural barriers.
Wells sees this as a critical moment, “Businesses need to find a new way to engage with their customers or risk becoming dinosaurs. They need a radical new way to build, deploy, customize and implement analytics that help them understand their customers and delight them.”
This is why FICO is taking its analytics and decision management tools and technology, including SaaS applications for social and mobile customer engagement, targeted marketing campaigns and offers, and delivering them in the Cloud. At FICO World, Wells gave attendees a first glance at the new cloud services for creating, customizing and deploying powerful analytic-driven applications and services. Wells believes this will spur Big Data innovation by giving application developers, business users and partners around the world simplified, flexible and cost-effective access to analytics.
Wells concluded his talk, “For 57 years, FICO has unlocked the doors to greater use of analytics. With the new FICO Analytic Cloud, we’re kicking those doors down.”
