Home Retail Group - Effectively managing customers with a partnership approach
Home Retail Group is the UK’s leading home and general merchandise retailer with sales of around £6 billion annually. It offers credit and insurance products to customers of its Argos and Homebase brands through its stores, online and through call centres
Home Retail Group faces the challenging backdrop from a position of operational and financial strength. The Group’s broad product offerings, low average transaction values and frequent customer visits are likely to offer resilience. Strength and leadership in multi-channel retailing will help to ensure that the relevance of the business model is maintained by offering true customer convenience.
With around two and a half million revolving credit accounts in its portfolio, Home Retail is committed to driving performance and customer service. As part of this commitment Home Retail engaged in a programme with TSYS (www.tsys.com) to provide full outsourced card processing services. TSYS is the one of the world’s largest providers of outsourced payment services and have worked with Experian on a number of highly successful collaborations in the past.
Home Retail chose Experian’s Probe SM customer management decision system to control customer scoring and decision strategies on the TS2 platform. Probe SM for customer management has been fully integrated with the TS2 platform since 2002.
Home Retail recognised the need to ensure that their existing, highly segmented decisioning strategies and processes would continue to be supported as part of the migration to the TSYS TS2 account management system. Any failure to achieve this would result in a significant loss in customer value to the business and would have a detrimental effect on customer service.
As part of the migration process, TSYS and Experian worked closely with Home Retail to understand credit risk management requirements for the migration and to identify any system customisations required to ensure that ‘Business As Usual’ continuity was successfully achieved.
Probe SM is used to manage and maximise key aspects of the customer relationship including risk scoring, exposure management, collections and transaction authorisations.
Benefits
- Home Retail was able to continue to use Probe SM’s customer management capabilities migration to the TS2 platform. The loss of this capability would have led to a significant cost to the business in terms of diminished customer value generation and deterioration in customer service levels.
- The design partnership approach adopted by Home Retail, TSYS and Experian to convert all Home Retail decision management strategies onto the TS2 Probe SM system was a key component of ensuring that business continuity would be maintained post-migration.
- Business continuity in credit risk management capabilities was successfully achieved from day 1 of the migration of the Home Retail
Paul Hirst, Head of Risk, Home Retail Group commented."Customer management is an area of key focus for the performance of our business."
“Probe SM has delivered the capabilities and control we needed, and in combination with the TSYS processing platform, we now have a high degree of strategic control over the management of our portfolio."
Kelley Knutson, Executive Vice President, TSYS International said."This project is a great example of how the partnership between Experian and TSYS can deliver significant benefits to clients.""Together we can provide efficiency gains and increased profitability, coupled with speed to market."
Argos and Homebase are two of the UK’s leading brands, with large customer bases across the UK and Ireland. Between them, the retail brands have more than 60 years of market heritage and consumer awareness. Argos was founded in 1973 and Homebase in 1981
Argos, the UK’s largest general merchandise retailer, has an unrivalled blend of choice, value and convenience to meet customer needs. Homebase is the UK’s second largest home improvement retailer, and offers a growing range of home enhancement products and services in a differentiated store environment.
If you would like to know more about this subject or have any questions for the author please Contact us
| .Interested in this subject? You may also be interested in... |
| TSYS and MobiVi partnerships deliver real value » |
| .Read the full Case Study for Home Retail Group |
| Visit the website to read more » |
| .Read more about Customer Management |
| Visit the website to read more » |