Transactis

Raising the stakes – Transactis build a single customer view for Betfair

Established in 2000, Betfair is now the world’s largest online betting exchange, handling over 5 million bets every day from a customer base of over 1 million.

They used three primary channels of communication with their customers; telephone, email and direct mail. No matter which channel they used, every campaign had to go through their data warehouse team, typically taking between 3 and 5 weeks to set up. For a direct mail campaign, Betfair would have to extract the data, make selections and exclusions, then send the data to a bureau for cleansing. Not only was this time-consuming and inflexible from a marketing point of view, it would also incur a £2000-£3000 cost each time.

Betfair wanted a better view of their customers as they were missing valuable marketing opportunities, and having trouble identifying individual customers with multiple accounts. They also wanted a database that could be cleansed, enhanced and updated rapidly to enable better customer analytics as well as faster execution of campaigns.

Using behavioural, historical and transactional feeds, CDMS built a Single Customer View database that updated daily, meaning the data was never more than 24 hours old, and the marketing team had access to the previous days behaviour every morning. Additionally, the database included automatic cleansing capabilities alongside data profile enhancement, so the customer base could be more accurately profiled. The database also meant that selections and exclusions could be easily carried out based on fresh, detailed behavioural and transactional data. Campaigns are now deployed in a managed environment enabling execution, tracking and adherence to right-time, right-channel contact strategies.

The project was completed on time and within budget, and Betfair were able to realise the benefits immediately.

• A significant increase in campaigns being executed - Betfair have gone from running 5 campaigns a month to up to 500
• Faster campaign turnaround – instead of 3-5 weeks, campaigns across multiple channels can now be delivered within 48 hours
• A unified view of customers and customer accounts – by identifying customer accounts belonging to one individual, Betfair can ensure they are contacting individual customers. This has resulted in increased customer satisfaction and a reduction in cals made to customer services
• Full CRM support – CDMS support the CRM team with campaign testing, learning and refining, ensuring continuous improvement of data and processes
• Extra analytical resource – CDMS provide proactive supplementary analysis resource which contributes innovative ideas for additional campaigns
• Fraud prevention benefits – a single view of all customers has enabled the fraud team to identify customers who were abusing the service with multiple accounts and identities
• A huge cost saving – the project has more than paid for itself in less than a year

CDMS has built a bespoke, online portal designed to enable marketers to access, understand and analyse the customer data within the SCV autonomously, and Betfair are now hitting their marketing targets and ready for sustained and innovative campaign activity.

Damart has Vision

Damart, the major international mail order company, currently have 2 million active customers and aim for an annual customer growth rate of 10%.

Damart were relying on a traditional linear approach to running campaigns, and needed a cost-effective and time-efficient database solution to drive their customer acquisition and retention programmes. They also needed greater insight into their customer and prospect base that could drive future campaign activity.

After reviewing Damart’s existing mailing and operational processes, Transactis developed an integrated solution using it’s revolutionary desktop marketing tool, Vision. Vision provides access to exactly the right prospects for each offer, plus all the tools required to create targeted direct marketing and get powerful customer and prospect insight – all directly from a desktop. Vision was delivered in phases that minimised disruption to existing business operations, and web access to Vision meant minimal IT input was required.

Using Vision, Damart can:

• Allocate account numbers and campaign codes to every contact in the database, with campaign and transactional history for each individual.
• Streamline their 3rd party data buying by identifying overlap and differences in performance.
• A single view of customers and prospects for the first time, coupled with sophisticated tools for multi-channel campaign management and analysis.
• Access to 40 million prospect records, each with extensive profiles and information on multi-source purchases, demographics and lifestyle information, all with fresh feeds every month.
• The ability to quickly make informed, intelligence-led campaign selections and use results for continuous improvement in campaign performance.

The benefits to Damart and overall campaign results since using Vision have been outstanding.

• The project was cost neutral after only 12 months – all costs were offset by subsequent savings in campaign processing and data purchasing
• Campaign turnaround times reduced by 50% from 12 weeks to 6 weeks
• Significant improvements in every aspect of campaign performance – the cost of new customer acquisition has decreased by 30% on average and the spend per new customer has increased
• Customer reactivation campaigns have seen an increase in response of 30-50%
• Greater customer and prospect insight, e.g. a detailed view on which demographic and behavioural variables drive response
• An effective contact strategy due to a greater understanding of the relationships between contact frequency, seasonality, customer profile and responses across different channels
• Accurate segmentation of the customer and prospect base for highly accurate and effective targeting

Damart’s Marketing Director John Bottomley comments...

“Vision has given us more control and better results from our direct marketing, over-delivering in almost every respect. Campaign timings have been slashed and costs have significantly decreased because we now buy data more effectively. Vision has already paid for itself and the improved response it is able to generate means our campaign ROI is consistently on the up.”

Talking Shop

Transactis transform Shop Direct Group catalogues to a digital customer service tool for contact centres.

Shop Direct Group (SDG) is the UK’s leading online and home shopping retailer, with a customer base of over 5 million and sales of up to £1.6 billion.  Headquartered in Speke, South Liverpool, the Group’s nine brands include: Littlewoods, Additions Direct, Empire Stores, Choice, Great Universal, Kays, Littlewoods Direct, Littlewoods Ireland and Marshall Ward. 

SDG is renowned for its commitment to customer care and since 2005 has implemented a dedicated initiative called Customer 1st to ensure that customer service remains at the heart of the enterprise.  With a business model based on distance selling, it is vital to deliver customer service to a high standard when a customer does get in contact.  Contact centres are therefore important links with the customer and in 2008, as part of continuous improvement, SDG looked at ways to further improve the service provided through this channel. 

The Challenge

As an industry leader, it is important that SDG continues to present the right merchandise at the right price.  To support the growing number of products on offer, SDG publishes different types of catalogue a year across all its brands to inform consumers of the variety products and services on offer.  The publications are classified as main book, mid-season book, leaflets and brochures.

With an impressive one in three households in the UK owning one or more of SDG’s catalogues (Autumn/Winter and Spring/Summer issues), contact centres needed to have numerous copies of the catalogues across all the company’s brands.  Contact centre agents require access to all printed materials to answer enquiries effectively, reinforce brand reputation and up-sell or cross-sell products.

Briony Cole, Process Improvement Project Manager at SDG, explains, “Our seven contact centres would need to receive the hard copies of publications following the print run.  However, with hard copies, they can go missing, pages become defaced after regular and long-term use, pages may begin to drop out and it is costly to house the numerous publications in each contact centre.”

SDG runs seven contact centres based in Sunderland, Preston, Worcester, Bolton, Burnley, Newtown and Crosby, as well as a small group of home-workers.  Ensuring printed catalogues are housed at these sites (across the nine brands and in all their different forms), creates an added logistical burden, whilst also posing a storage problem for home-workers.

Importantly, the use of printed catalogues to answer customer queries meant that contact centre representatives had to physically find a copy of the relevant publication from a central storage point, bring it back to their desks and manually sift through it to locate the right product.  “We estimated that it was taking our advisors approximately 50 seconds just to access the correct product in the relevant publication,” adds Cole.

The Solution

To resolve these challenges the idea of producing searchable digital catalogues was developed.  Cole comments, “In September 2008 we were ready to start developing the virtual books and selected Transactis because they provided us with a solution that gave us the look and feel that we wanted.  They also manage the production of our hard copy catalogues and digital assets which meant that we were able to deliver a pilot in only two months – an impressively fast turnaround.”

Transactis works closely with SDG’s marketing and publishing team to put together the catalogues for publication throughout the year.  In order to do so, the marketing solution provider has a dedicated print management and creative team who utilise the latest technology for online proofing, digital asset management and production print. 

Cole explains, “Once the catalogue is signed off to be printed in hard copy, it is at this point that the digital file is produced by Transactis which will eventually become the virtual book.  Programming the file to allow photographs to be magnified, pages to be flickable and text searchable is all carried out by the team at Transactis.  The digital catalogue is then checked by us and it is made available to all the contact centre advisors across SDG’s intranet.”

The virtual book is identical to the printed version in every way and was launched internally as ‘Virtual Books’ in January 2009.

The Result

Since using Virtual Books, SDG has seen a numerous benefits in contact centre service provision.  The greatest impact has been on the ease of providing relevant information to the customer.  Customer service representatives are now able to access the relevant page in real-time without having to leave the customer on hold or schedule a call back in order to find a hard copy publication. 

Moreover, the Virtual Book provides additional benefits which were not available with the print editions.  These include:

• Simple navigation, bookmarks and the ability to search for products based on brand, product name, catalogue code or page numbers leading to faster call handling times
• Notes can be added to pages within the Virtual Book to allow for information useful to the advisor to be displayed alongside the product (previously the adviser would have to check against a hard copy list)
• The zoom facility on the images means that advisors can better describe the image to customers from their digital copy.  Advisors can display detailed product knowledge such as what a motif says on a t-shirt, whether a top has diamante, what the neckline is like, whether the dress is trimmed with lace.

The ability to up-sell or cross-sell products is also achieved at the click of a mouse.  Whereas previously the advisor would have spent time finding and riffling through a publication to answer a query, the time saved can now be spent on providing additional information and promoting different products that could be of interest.  For example, an advisor can access stock availability (through a separate internal system) at the same time as looking at a product in the Virtual Book; if it is out of stock they can quickly find other similar products using the search function and potentially saving the sale.

The benefits to customer service operations has resulted in enthusiastic feedback from contact centre agents.  Cole reports, “For us, Virtual Books is about being able to see a publication that a customer gets and be confident that what you’re seeing is exactly what the customer is seeing.  The positive response from our staff across the contact centres has been fantastic.  Many feel that it is a positive evolvement as far as their work is concerned.  Some have even said how relaxing it was to flick through the pages as you can turn the pages over interactively!

“The Virtual Book was designed to be easy to use.  The training time we put aside for each agent was 30 minutes. We have found however that on average, agents have understood how to use the Virtual Book within 10 minutes so it is a very intuitive tool.”

An additional benefit of producing Virtual Books is the significant reduction in environmental impact achieved through the paper savings.  Previously, ten thousand copies a year of the main books (over 1000 pages) would be sent to the seven contact centres, as well as copies of all the leaflets (varying from 6-120 pages in length).  “Good business practice dictates that we keep 10 per cent of this stock in contact centres for contingency purposes, nevertheless, there is a considerable paper saving now being made annually,” adds Cole. 

Print, postage and storage of these publications is also saved by the business.  The cost of these savings is estimated to be £220,000 over the next year. 

“The ease of electronic storage means that we are able to keep an archive of catalogues.  We aim to have a rolling library of up to four years of publications to ensure that we cover all the queries that customers should have from previous items purchased. This archive facility once again has important customer service element to it.” 

Cole concludes, “Working with Transactis on Virtual Books has meant that we were able to deliver this project on time.  They really do listen to what the customer wants, have a positive attitude which helps to continually push progress forward, yet can provide solutions that are creative in design and scope.  Whilst it is early to measure customer feedback, the positive response from our contact centre staff is encouraging.  Subsequently, the business is looking at ways to continue to develop Virtual Books for customer service delivery.”

The flexibility of the solution created by Transactis means that there are a number of further applications for digital catalogues, including:-

• Creation of customer facing personalised publications.  A smaller digital catalogue (known as part-catalogues) could be produced to present the products/services the retailer knows the customer is interested in.  Not only does this produce a more targeted communication but also allows browsing of the catalogue to be more intelligent.  Links can be embedded to lead the customer or prospect to a transactional website, moving images can be made available in the digital version and links to compatible products can be created to encourage cross-sell e.g. by viewing and considering a purchase for a digital camera, this product entry could link to a camera case, lenses or tripod.
• Preview catalogues for a particular line can be created easily through the use of digital publications.  Its online nature means that for the marketer, the ability to track which products were viewed most will be is vital tool to gauging customer demand.
• When creating hard copy publications, digital proofing will be vital to speed up this stage and ensure a quality catalogue is produced.  By producing an electronic version of the publication, retailers will be able to set page orders and determine the look, feel and flow at the click of a button, replacing the need to print drafts and produce boards.