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Brief
Which? used to be purely a monthly magazine subscription-based business, with multiple customer interactions. More recently an online offering was developed, but as the consumer landscape changed and customers began accessing Which? information and services in many different ways, Which? found that its existing information and data infrastructure was often too inflexible to cope.
Which? needed to become more agile and offer a wide range of alternative products around its core offering of consumer advice, but this change necessitated a re-appraisal of business information and data.
Crispin Westhead, Head of CRM at Which?, explains: “If you look at our new product portfolio – things like the switching service and one-off mortgage advice – these demand a different customer relationship. Traditionally, our marketing data focused on acquiring subscription-based customers. We needed to re-engineer our data and business processes so that we could deliver the business agility the organisation required to respond to customers more effectively, while remaining true to the Which? core values of being open, honest and ethical.”
At the time, Which? had a SAS business intelligence application which it used to consolidate customer information into a Data Warehouse for analysis and access for various marketing and communication activities. But Which? felt the existing infrastructure could not effectively respond to the changes it was facing, and it did not have the expertise in-house to fully exploit the SAS application.
Strategy
To undertake the complex data infrastructure re-engineering, and make their customer data structure more customer-centric, rather subscription centric, Which? brought in SAS business solutions specialist Amadeus Software Limited.
“Which? wanted a partner that it could trust and one that could understand how we work and what we needed,” explained Westhead. “Very quickly Amadeus struck us as people who knew what they were talking about; had integrity and gave us the confidence that they would help us design an architecture to support the business going forward.”
Execution
Amadeus installed a SAS® Customer Intelligence Solution and provided expert training and support to Which? staff regarding Data Integration and making the best use of the SAS Business Intelligence software.
Westhead said: “The neat thing about the Amadeus solution is an architecture that means all we have to worry about is where data fits, not if it fits. Today’s business is magazine and on-line subscriptions plus some new services, but as the organisation grows what I don’t know is what we’ll be doing in five years’ time. With the Amadeus solution and the new, agile architecture, that’s not a problem.
Results
Amadeus has helped Which? develop a much more agile and scalable Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system which immediately began delivering a return on investment, cuts data processing time from days to hours, delivers valuable, highly targeted marketing data about the consumer rights champion’s customers AND will pay for itself within 12 months.
“The CRM system that Amadeus helped develop has delivered real payback and benefits to the business, which means it will pay for itself within 12 months - which on a project of this scale is pretty hard to do,” explained Westhead
One of the main benefits of the new CRM system is cost savings. These have been achieved by improving the time it takes to process data, greater efficiency and being able to do much more, with the same head count. For example, some processes that had to be outsourced are now handled by Which? staff.
Westhead added: “Without our new data infrastructure and Amadeus’ help in developing it, I couldn’t deliver to the business, the high-quality CRM system we have today. Re-engineering the way Which? manages customer information isn’t a one-time job, it’s an on-going process which evolves as customer and business needs change. So we see Amadeus as a partner that comes with us on this journey.”
The information that Which? can now extract out of its new Data Warehouse gives the organisation a much better and deeper understanding of customers. In turn, this allows the organisation to communicate with customers more effectively, making marketing far more relevant and personalised for customers.
The Amadeus solution has helped significantly reduce data processing times from several days, or even weeks, to hours or less. “The other day the business requested some customer information, expecting it in a week or so. We delivered it within a few minutes. Not only is the business getting the data it needs much faster, the data and business analysis team is focused on solving business problems rather than wading through masses of data,” explained Westhead.
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