Royal Mail is placing increasing importance on ecommerce.

The organisation wants to increase its online revenues and use technology to integrate customer information with internet services.

And the firm is to extend its ecommerce infrastructure through the use of additional software components.

Dennis Greene, Royal Mail head of ebusiness, told Computing that the latest investment is designed to build on huge growth in its online business – revenues doubled in the last financial year.

‘In addition to rising revenues, customer use is rising all the time. We have 18.1 million registered users, and have experienced year-on-year growth in the region of 30 to 40 per cent,’ he said.

‘We are getting to a point where it is becoming more and more important to make sure our web sites are giving the customers exactly what they want.’

The Royal Mail has three web sites, one for each of its businesses: Royal Mail, Parcelforce Worldwide and the Post Office. All the sites are managed through a single central system.

The organisation uses a sales and marketing portal from vendor ATG, which was originally used to integrate 40 new and legacy applications into a comprehensive ecommerce system. This system enabled the consolidation of services, such as parcel tracking with postcode and address search capabilities.

The firm also uses content management software from specialist provider Autonomy and search software from Documentum.

Greene says adding more functions to the ecommerce portal will help Royal Mail to capture customer information consistently from multiple sources, and track customer behaviour more accurately across its web sites.

‘There is a range of new features we would like to exploit, including the personalisation module we haven’t used yet. We based the web platform predominantly on the ATG portal because of its strength in ecommerce integration, but we have toyed with adding the extra functionality of personalisation and customisation,’ he said.

‘Now we are looking at all sorts of e-initiatives that will make it easier to service customers online or to offer self-service.’

The ebusiness division will now develop systems to create a consistent and automated operational view of customers that will be used simultaneously by all customer-facing applications.

Royal Mail is also looking to add more interactive areas to its sites, to improve tracking of parcels for individual and business customers. It also wants to increase customer personalisation and self-service customisation.

‘We already use the portal to integrate the back-end, and now it can enable better integrated personal customer information at the front,’ said Greene.

‘But we are also hoping to achieve more immediate cost savings by making services available more quickly and efficiently.

‘Data from anywhere in the organisation that the ecommerce platform uses could save us an awful lot of money on integration,’ he added.