Situation

To purchase a Red Letter Days experience, customers can either go online or telephone direct. For the customer to receive their gift experience, it is essential that the address collected is correct. Furthermore, when a Red Letter Day event is given to someone as a gift, the recipient needs to contact the company to book the experience,
so it is important to have their correct contact details to send them the booking confirmation.

Solution

Red Letter Days use QAS Pro Web to capture and validate customers’ addresses who buy online, or by telephone via the call centre, and when their call centre agents’ confirm bookings. The software processes around 300,000 addresses each year, around one third of which are in the six weeks leading up to Christmas. The software is also used to verify contact details for outbound marketing campaigns.

The Red Letter Days system operates a customer relationship management (CRM) system in its call centre. In 2009, when the Experian QAS software was upgraded to a new version, the CRM system needed to be upgraded alongside it. “One of the biggest endorsements we can offer for the Experian QAS software is the fact that we chose to change our CRM system to stick with Experian QAS,” says Red Letter Days Head of IT and ecommerce, Gerry O’Brien. “It’s also worth noting the ease with which our developers could develop the new integration of the legacy system with the new version of the Experian QAS software. It was very easy to develop a new interface for the legacy system, and integrate Experian QAS with the CRM system.”

Results

Red Letter Days has come to rely on the Experian QAS contact data management solutions to ensure the accuracy of customer contact details. In recent years, the balance of the company’s business has shifted from 50 per cent online/50 per cent call centre to 90 per cent online/10 per cent call centre.

“The importance of Experian QAS solutions online is critical to this shift,” says O’Brien. “We would not have achieved this if Experian QAS was not capable of handling the growth. Experian QAS delivers the goods consistently, and we are absolutely satisfied with it.” He goes on to explain the implications of having inaccurate address data. “If we send something out with the wrong address, it comes back to us for resending, which means we pay twice, and the customer gets poor service,” he says. “Fortunately, since we have had the Experian QAS software in place, this happens very, very rarely, and when it does happen, it tends to be when the address has been entered manually.”