National Express unifies 7.8 million customer records and slashes process times from 8 hrs to 1 hr
National Express’ sales, marketing, and services systems held different information about the same customers, preventing teams from understanding context and supporting, selling, and retaining customers.
Showoff migrated all customer records to a single customer engagement platform on Heroku, reconciled duplicate records from 30+ million to 7.8 million, and integrated sales, services, marketing tools so every interaction was recorded and available to every team.
A unified data foundation slashed process times from 8 hours to 1 hour and has helped the sales and marketing team sell more and retain more customers.
Reduced customer data records from 30m+ to 7.8m
100% uptime thanks to a new data platform
Process times slashed from 8 hours to 1 hour
“Showoff helped us navigate an incredibly complex project — and built the digital foundation that lets us analyse our customer profiles and target them directly based on our specific priorities. As a result, we’ve been able to sell more, retain more customers and fully integrate our marketing and customer teams.”
– Mark Kelly, Digital Director, National Express
Dude, where’s my data?
Providing transport links to over 16 million commuters every year generates a hell of a lot of data — 30+ million dynamic customer records to be exact. But National Express wasn't using that data to support, sell to, or retain customers.
Problem was, National Express’ data infrastructure was siloed, with different information about the same customers stored in separate systems depending on which part of the business a customer engaged with.
Sales couldn’t see if services had responded to an issue. Marketing couldn’t see if sales had reached out to a customer. Services didn’t know which marketing communications customers had seen. Everyone was in the dark.
And being in the dark laddered up to wider business problems: a lack of customer targeting, missed retention and sales opportunities, poor service… and lost revenue.
National Express knew it needed a new way to manage its customer data that would give sales, marketing, and services teams a unified picture of every customer detail and interaction. The goal? To improve targeting, boost retention, and prevent lost revenue.
That’s when they reached out to Showoff for help.
Unifying National Express’ data
Showoff created a single platform to host all of National Express’ data.
First, National Express worked with Showoff to migrate data from its legacy infrastructure to a modern fit-for-purpose Salesforce environment. Showoff set up integrations to Salesforce’s Marketing and Service Cloud that feed into each customer’s profile, so all new data is automatically collected and stored in the new data foundation.
Teams now have access to the same data instantly, which gives them a clear view of customers, across all channels.
“Our teams are fully integrated and share one dataset between them. So if you have a marketing conversation with a customer, our service teams have complete visibility too. It’s seamless,” explains Digital Director, Mark Kelly.
A platform powered by Heroku
To host National Express’ growing volume of data sets, records, and customer profiles, a new customer engagement platform was created on Heroku.
Showoff cleansed and reconciled National Express’ data sets by migrating all customer records to a single Heroku Postgres database and deduplicated 34m records down to 7.8m. By stripping away inaccurate information, National Express can now create a more personalised experience that addresses actual customer needs.
How? The Heroku Postgres integration with Salesforce provides lightning fast data sharing across Sales, Service, Marketing, and Data Clouds. And with easy-to-configure connectors and zero-copy functionality, National Express can easily distribute data across different platforms in whatever format works best – for that all important 360 customer view.
Data that’s accessible and actionable
By centralising customer data, National Express’ teams now work with the same context. Every customer is accounted for, which means marketing, sales, and service teams can create strategies, target audience segments, and troubleshoot issues much more effectively.
“Showoff … built the digital foundation that lets us analyse our customer profiles and target them directly based on our specific priorities. As a result, we’ve been able to sell more, retain more customers and fully integrate our marketing and customer teams.” explains Kelly.
With a unified data foundation, process times were cut from 8 hours to 1 hour. Instead of swapping between platforms to hunt for relevant data, Showoff helps consolidate it—pulling over 13+ data sources together and feeding them directly into Salesforce.
At launch, National Express experienced 100% uptime for its new platform, a substantial boost from its previous effort of 48 days of downtime the previous year.
What’s next for National Express?
With a unified data foundation, Showoff has opened the door to new functionality, use cases, and customer opportunities. “If we have new functionality, something that needs plumbing, or we need to squeeze extra insights out of our data, we know we can rely on Showoff for support” says Kelly.