JD Williams hopes to boost lifetime value of its
customers with CRM.
UK users were on hand to give an honest account of the ups and
downs of a datawarehousing projects, at last week's annual Teradata
user conference.
JD Williams, the UK's largest clothing catalogue retailer, has been
a Teradata user since 1990, when it installed a 10Gbyte
datawarehouse, initially to support marketing campaigns. At the
time, the company's former chief executive called the rollout, the
best IT decision the company had ever made.
However, chief information officer at JD Williams, Graham Green,
revealed that the relationship with Teradata went slightly sour
after 1999, when he oversaw the purchase of the latest version of
the company's datawarehouse.
"The perfect irony with NCR [Teradata's parent company] was that it
attempted to sell CRM software to its customers when it did not
have relationships with them," he said. "It did not have one with
me at the time - they stopped calling after I bought the latest
'box'."
As a result of this lack of communication, Green decided to
investigate other datawarehouse offerings from rival technology
firms when the system was approaching the end of the its three-year
cycle in 2002.
"We produced a shortlist of Teradata, IBM, Oracle and Sybase before
deciding on a full tender from Teradata and IBM," he said. "IBM
offered a fully-funded conversion study into replacing Teradata
that was worth about $75,000 (£48,000), so we gave Teradata three
months to get their act together."
At the end of the three-month period, the IT department at JD
Williams concluded that IBM could probably do the conversion, but
that the cost would be "horrendous" at around £1m. Green said, "We
would have possibly gone with IBM in a 'greenfield' situation
[where prior no system existed] but it was too much".
The result of putting the contract out to tender was that Teradata
finally woke up, Green said. "Teradata raised its game, with our
help. It provided a complete roadmap of Teradata CRM with
TouchPoint Server [business intelligence technology], which will
allow us to realise our vision of where we want to be."
That vision involves JD Williams being able to ask the best and
most applicable question every time a customer contacts the
company, Green explained.
"We have 60 million minutes' worth of contact with our customers
every year," he said. "If we knew what particular question to ask
that customer at that time, we could really move the business
on.
"For example, if we can ask customers why they are not buying
shoes, we could suggest some shoe offers which, if they take them
up, would increase the lifetime value of that customer. An average
customer spends £360 every year with us and, if we can get that to
£450, the impact on our profits will be massive."
For much of the conference, Teradata highlighted its own vision of
"active datawarehousing" - the facility to access relevant business
information from company databases as and when it is needed.
This concept is already proving beneficial to JD Williams, Green
said. "When we receive returned goods in the wrong size, we put a
query into the system to find out when they were purchased and by
who. We then call the customer and offer an alternative size - 67%
buy the item, which is remarkably high."
