Bourne Leisure

“Using Matchcode has significantly improved the value and usability of the Butlins, Haven and Warner Breaks databases and we know that every new address that is entered into the Holiday Sales Systems is of the same quality and common format. We expect to roll out names data across all our brands, as it will further support accurate addressing and help identify real duplicates in each of the databases.”

IT Manager at Bourne Leisure, Jeremy Stancombe

The UK’s Largest Holiday Supplier

For many years, millions of children, adults, families and couples up and down the UK have enjoyed holidays through Butlins, Haven and Warner Breaks at one of their 35 Holiday Parks, three Resorts or 13 Hotels respectively. These three household name brands are owned by holding company Bourne Leisure, the largest supplier of UK holidays to UK residents.

Based in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, each Bourne Leisure holiday brand function as a separate company, managing individual contact centres and websites, operated across a single IT infrastructure. The Holiday Sales systems used in the contact centres are a mixture of third party applications provided by Bourne Leisure’s technology partners, which includes Seaware from Versonix for Haven, Infocentre’s infoRM for Warner Breaks and an in-house developed system for Butlins. Each of these applications has its own infrastructure including database server, applications servers and web farms.

In total, Haven, Butlins and Warner contact centre agents and web sites deal with approximately one million bookings annually from new and existing customers.

Ensuring A Common Customer Address View

Bourne Leisure had used address validation from a leading supplier for new customer bookings since 1991, but more recently inconsistencies were identified. IT Manager at Bourne Leisure, Jeremy Stancombe explains, “Using address validation ensured addresses were complete, up-to-date and accurate. Not only do we need to ensure receipts from contact centre bookings, direct mail and brochures reach our customers, but the perception of our brands can be affected by incorrectly addressed correspondence.”

Every address taken in the contact centres is validated as is all the historical data which is stored in three marketing databases, one for each brand, totalling over six million records. Address validation promotes a common address view for each new booking, ensuring uniformity and ease of identifying a customer.

“The previous address validation software did not support multiple residents at the same address or sub-premises, for example in a large block of flats,” says Stancombe. “Inaccuracies resulted in unnecessary print and postage costs for undelivered mail, postal delays and difficulties for contact centre agents calling up accounts for an enquiry, as well as affecting the accuracy of our prospect marketing and segmentation activity.”

The existing software was implemented at every level of each contact centre application as well as the websites, resulting in higher license costs for Bourne Leisure,  increased risk of technical error and the potential for systems to get out of sync.

Test of Accuracy

Bourne Leisure approached Capscan to solve these challenges. From an initial pilot batch test of 100,000 customer records, Bourne Leisure immediately realised that Capscan’s address validation tool, Matchcode Data Capture (DC), performed significantly better than the previous supplier in applying Bourne Leisure’s common format to sub-premises. Capscan was also able to deploy Matchcode DC on a centrally hosted server, enabling each individual application to make an address validation query in real-time, without the software having to be integrated and maintained at each level.

“We chose to implement Capscan’s Matchcode DC because we were able to prove its accuracy in verifying and formatting our existing records. The central address server also reduced the number of individual user licenses we required and met the strategic requirement we had to consolidate smaller servers into our existing infrastructure,” says Stancombe.

Matchcode Enables Single Address Server

Bourne Leisure implemented Matchcode onto a common server in its VMWare server farm and each application supplier implemented a new user interface for each contact centre and Web application.

Today, Matchcode DC enables Bourne Leisure’s contact centre agents and website customers to enter either a postcode or partial address (where the postcode is unknown) into the Holiday Sales System and return the full correct address. In this way a complete address can be captured with the minimum number of keystrokes. Matchcode DC ensures that the Butlins, Haven and Warner Breaks customer databases are only populated with accurate and up-to-date address information. It does this by comparing records to the 27 million addresses in Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File (PAF).

“Matchcode’s performance has matched the pilot test and more,” states Stancombe. “We can be confident that every new address entered into the Holiday Sales System is as accurate as possible and presents a clear, common format across the board, for easy record retrieval and repeat custom.”

Matchcode Batch, Capscan’s batch cleansing product, also fully supports Bourne Leisure’s ad-hoc bulk validation requirement, associated with special offers in national press, “Often one of our holiday brands collaborates with a newspaper to offer a discount promotion on holiday bookings. This means we receive electronic files containing hundreds of bookings on a daily basis when offers are running, all of which are loaded and validated by Matchcode in one go, even if part of the address is missing or illegible.”

Ease of updating has also been beneficial for Bourne Leisure, as previously when the Royal Mail PAF required one of its regular updates, the same would be required for each installation of the software. “With Matchcode, a single upgrade on the server is all that is required, saving us much time and cost in managing the update on each application,” adds Stancombe.

The booking process has also been enhanced for the 25% of annual bookings that are made through one of Bourne Leisure’s websites, as Stancombe remarks, “Implementing Matchcode has provided better accuracy for all types of residence so a more specific address is guaranteed to be found when it is looked up.

More recently Bourne Leisure purchased Matchcode Names with additional MOSAIC (lifestyle) data from Capscan to enhance its marketing activity, in particular for Haven caravan owners and prospects. Bourne Leisure has initially performed a bulk validation of the Haven customer database validating the names of residents at each address, to ensure eradication of duplicates and better segmenting prospects. MOSAIC data is also now appended to postcodes of each new address entered into the Holiday Sales System.

“Using Matchcode has significantly improved the value and usability of the Butlins, Haven and Warner Breaks databases and we know that every new address that is entered into the Holiday Sales System is of the same quality and common format. We expect to roll out names data across all our brands, as it will even further support accurate addressing and help identify real duplicates in each of the databases,” concludes Stancombe.