RAC develops its own CRM project

The RAC will go live at the end of this month with the first phase of a £5m customer relationship management (CRM) initiative. The motoring services company has shunned packaged software suppliers by developing its own central data warehouse.

The CRM project was begun six months ago and will be used by thousands of RAC staff when it is completed at the end of 2002.

It is part of a company-wide programme called Customer Centric Management to organise the RAC around its members' needs, said business systems manager Duncan Cooper.

"It's about changing the philosophy of the RAC, putting the customer at the heart of the business. The data warehouse will give us a single view of the customer across the whole of our relationship and interactions with them," he explained.

The first phase involves gathering and analysing data from RAC's consumer breakdown business, plus travel and legal services, and will be followed by marketing campaigns in these areas starting in August.

"The segmentation and modelling of data will give us a better understanding of customers, allowing us to market more effectively and target them with products and services at the right time they want to receive those offers," said Cooper.

The service company expects to recoup its investment by making more money out of marketing campaigns. "We hope to make a return in other areas as well but they are less easy to define," he said.

Cooper explained that the RAC decided to build the central data warehouse in-house so it could be designed around the company's business model. Some software packages are being used for specific tasks where generic functionality is acceptable. For example, marketing campaigns will be based on software from CRM supplier Chordiant.

The data warehouse will run in a new, purpose built data centre in Bristol using Oracle database software on IBM's pSeries Unix servers. More than 500Gb of data has been collected so far, with an anticipated increase to several terabytes.

Cooper believes that the key to a successful CRM project is to have a good understanding of the data in the source systems that will be analysed in the data warehouse. "It's the foundation you build on," he said.