17 Sep 2012: Experian has been appointed by TUI UK, the travel and leisure business, to help it gain a more accurate view of its customers, becoming a more customer-centric organisation. 

TUI UK is part of TUI Travel Plc, which is one the world's leading leisure travel companies operating in over 180 countries with more than 30 million customers in 31 key source markets, including the UK where it operates under brands such as Thomson and First Choice.

Experian was tasked with working alongside TUI UK’s incumbent CRM partner Creatormail to deliver a Single Customer View (SCV) service that would bring together more than 40million customer records held across two different legacy systems to create a more complete and accurate view of each customer and their interactions with TUI UK brands over a number of years.  This SCV will allow TUI UK to put its customers at the heart of its business, supporting its multi-channel campaigns by driving more relevant and engaging communications based on insight into its customers’ interests and holiday preferences.

Experian uses its suite of data quality, matching and consolidation tools in order to enable duplicates to be accurately identified within the database. The tools provide each record with a unique personal identifier which then allows a master record to be created for each individual customer.  

With its data in one source and a single view of its customers, TUI UK will join the so-called SCV Elites, gaining valuable customer insight to improve its relationship, retention and cross-selling activities. 

Louise Kendall, Business Lead for Customer Data Management at TUI UK & Ireland commented: “Our challenge was to create an accurate view of all of our customers across our UK mainstream travel brands, bringing together several systems and customer interactions over many years. Our incumbent CRM partner was selected to build the SCV, and after extensive research and reviewing the best of breed products and services in the market, we selected Experian’s Link and Unify products to integrate into our build to provide us with the customer centricity that we were missing. We’re confident that we have selected the strongest products to help us enhance our customer data capabilities.”

Nigel Wilson, Managing Director, Data & Analytics, Experian Marketing Services, UK & Ireland commented: “Being truly customer-focussed and putting customers at the very centre of the business is vital for brands looking to drive engagement in today’s multi-channel world.  Our research shows that 84 per cent of consumers would vote with their feet and take their business elsewhere if they felt an organisation didn’t understand their tastes and preferences2.  Working with TUI UK has been a great opportunity to use our expertise to show the power of a Single Customer View in managing customers across channels.”