CRM in Practice: Wolters Kluwer

The legal sector is one of the most heavily regulated and compliance-centric markets. Wolters Kluwer UK provides legal publications and services to businesses to help them comply with tax and governance laws, which are constantly changing.

Clearly in this environment, accurate data is imperative so Wolters Kluwer needed a system which provides targeted campaign management whilst ensuring data quality to avoid any legal implications.

"We needed to address the way in which we engaged with our customers to ensure that we were maximising the relationship we have with them," says Mike Turner, Business Systems Manager of Wolters Kluwer. "We had individual database, in some cases too many of them. These would range from corporate systems through to a regional salesman with a database on his laptop. We have grown through acquisition which has resulted in lots of pools of data. We have customers within those individual group companies.

"Our first driver was how do we obtain an overview of the customer, who is the customer of Wolters Kluwer? We needed to take key information pools and pull them together to see what the result would be if we could do that. Could we become customer-focused and customer-centric?"

The firm needed to cleanse its current data to improve data quality and access. It also wanted to consolidate several separate databases of corporate information into a single customer centric database, from which highly targeted marketing campaigns could be automated, managed and tracked.

"We had invested heavily as a European-concern in SAP as our ERP system so we looked at SAP CRM," says Turner. "One of the reasons we didn’t go with this was because we felt we were still only part way towards implementing its base functionality and that trying to stretch it further might break it. We talked to Oracle, but they didn’t really come to terms with the focus of what we needed. In the end it boiled down to total cost of ownership and best fit. The key to us was the integration of a range of solutions."

The company selected SAS' marketing automation software to meet these needs. In a pilot project of seven weeks, SAS built a consolidated customer view to run several campaigns. Across the pilot project, response rates were up in all cases. The best results were seen in the Tax and Finance division, where one of the campaigns returned three times the expected revenue target. Other campaigns aimed at setting appointments for field sales, also yielded much improved results with the call ratio success increasing by 30%. All of this was attributed to improved targeting and campaign management.

"We started small with the pilot," recalls Turner. "We picked the areas that we could measure effectively. Would it make a difference? And would it be a good or bad difference? One part of the project was within accounting and financial. The other was within Wolters Kroner. We went through the process of integrating the data required for those areas. Some of the data sources were based on legacy databases. Some were based on list sources.

"We compiled and built the data sets. Having run campaigns in those areas in the past, we had a good track record in understanding what could be achieved. But in previous years we had taken a long time to put these campaigns together, but that went from two weeks to two days. In terms of the consolidation of data and in terms of what we were able to achieve, we exceeded our targets by three times. We got a pretty good idea very quickly that the integration worked and that our targeting was much improved. We could do things faster and we could measure that."

Wolters Kluwer believes that the SAS software provides a clear understanding of the balance between customer retention and acquisition, clearly measure campaign success, reduce costs in sales and marketing activity and optimise marketing spend. This in turn can be used to encourage self-sufficiency in marketers and enable them to spot new opportunities through train of thought analysis and receive a better return on campaigns though improved targeting.

Folowing the pilot, the company looked to do a wider roll-out. "Our steering committee had marketing, business and IT people on it," says Turner. "We had to be realistic about our expectations. We were not going to get ‘world peace’ overnight. We needed to find our points of pain and how we could address those best. By getting these guys together at an early stage and having them discuss things before the arguments could develop, we were able to avoid problems.

"We produced an end of pilot report which looked at the results and issues. It included a training and skills analysis to see what would be needed to develop our own team. After the steering committee, this report went to the main UK board where we quoted the results from the pilot and then the issues and problems that we might encounter, then to the main board in Holland.

"All areas of the business will eventually be integrated and the idea of being customer centric will be a reality. We now have all the key databases pulled together and a single view of the customers, which is in itself enlightening. We had customers who we might not have classed as a key account in the past, but when we got a corporate view we saw that they were a lot more than we thought."

By Stuart Lauchlan
News & Analysis Editor
stuart.lauchlan@mycustomer.com