Qantas Airways opts for Teradata solution to reduce marketing process from five days to four hours

Teradata solution helps Qantas deal with its 10 million frequent-flyer members

Australian airline Qantas Airways has chosen Teradata's CRM solution to help to speed up turnaround time for its entire marketing process from five days to four hours.

The airline has a frequent-flyer programme, which has nearly 10 million members and generates $9bn (£5.3bn) revenue from customer loyalty.

The programme runs more than 250 campaigns each year primarily through email channels and dispatches 50,000 customised newsletters per month.

Because of the growing amount – and complexity – of customer relationships, Qantas wanted one solution, with one provider rather than dealing with disparate systems. The turnaround time for the entire marketing process, including analytics, selecting contacts, dispatching emails through a third-party contractor and collecting feedback was taking as long as five days.

Stacey Nguyen, head of collation analytics at Qantas, explained that the time taken to turn around these campaigns was critical as customers expect companies to react swiftly to their requests.

"While moving from pure [ad hoc] initiatives to repeatable operations marketing, we felt that our disparate standalone systems remained immature. They required too much manual work and were too time consuming when dealing with the various Qantas departments and our 400 partners," she said.

Nguyen explained that despite knowing that the firm had to move away from disparate systems in its marketing efforts, it needed to determine whether or not it wanted to continue with separate solutions for the internal customer management side and the external digital messaging side.

The two distinct systems would have to be connected somehow, but Nguyen suggested that "a more radical, totally integrated approach was felt preferable".

So Qantas decided to go for Teradata's integrated marketing management solution and automate all related processes. Using Teradata Relationship Manager, Qantas has a single view of its customers, which may help it to communicate with them more easily.

Qantas then installed several service components from Teradata – the marketing operations application, customer interaction manager application and digital messaging centre application. It plans to follow this with the implementation of Teradata's real-time interaction manager.

The installation of Teradata's solution has significantly reduced turnaround at Qantas.

"We can now send communications and have conversations with customers using the most recent customer information. Our turnaround time has come down from five days to four hours and will be reduced to five minutes through continued improvements," Nguyen stated.

But while the new system may have benefitted the company, Nyugen stated that the firm encountered a number of challenges during the transition period "but few which had not been anticipated".

She explained that by implementing an integrated approach, other systems were affected.

"Many of our legacy functions were affected by the transition, and we needed to find the right person in the organisation to help resolve the issues. The networking and corporate firewall aspects required the most attention.

"Change management was another challenge, as the new solution and its benefits needed to be communicated to all of the marketing staff who were required to adopt a workflow system they were not accustomed to," Nguyen explained.

The project made her realise the importance of focusing on the overall picture.

"The view on the project must remain consistent from the pre-sales phase through contracts and implementations. Focusing on the big picture is just as important as never losing sight of the details. Good local working relationships across all functional areas and customised training are essential," she stated.