DVD rental company Lovefilm suffered significant
disruption to its customer services and a knock-on loss of sales
when it consolidated onto a single platform following its merger
with Video Island earlier this year, Computer Weekly has
learned.
The migration of Video Island's 200,000-strong customer database
onto Lovefilm's own proprietary database of the same size was the
key integration challenge posed by the link-up, which is among
Europe's largest e-commerce mergers. However, the project ran into
problems which affected online customer sign-ups and
cancellations.
The consolidation programme started in April when the merger
agreement between Lovefilm and Video Island was signed. Between
them, the companies' warehouses receive and dispatch more than
100,000 packages every day.
Lovefilm's chief operating officer William Reeve said, "There is
something inherently terrifying when you are moving several hundred
thousand customers' data from one schema to another.
"We have had less website time. That has meant less sign-up
activity and fewer sales. I would characterise it as a dent in our
growth rather than lost sales."
The new company, which trades under the name Lovefilm, completed
the consolidation of its customer records last month.
During the migration, the contact centre was unable to access
customer records and so could not answer customer queries.
The consolidated platform successfully processed changes to
customer records, but contact centre staff could not tell customers
that changes had been made because they were accessing replicas of
the customer-record database, which was not consistently
updating.
Reeve said, "There have been periods where they have not had
access to the replicas for people's data. We were not as quick at
answering e-mails so we were slow in getting back to
customers."
He added that the customer representatives had now cleared
October's backlog of queries.
The two rental companies had combined sales of £25m last year.
The target for the combined company in 2006 is £50m.
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