Case study: First National

First National is one of the UK's leading personal finance companies. They have over half a million customers, lending circa £1.5 billion per year.

First National's, motor finance strategy was focused on delivering ever-higher levels of customer service. This also included improved support for its intermediaries. The objective was to build a more effective and cost efficient telesales operation.

First National developed an industry specific, multi-channel customer relationship management system (CRM) to support the business.

The management team knew that in order to gain the anticipated return on investment, they needed to monitor and manage business performance.

Solution

A comprehensive data warehouse was developed to underpin the measurement and management of the CRM programme.

The data warehouse specification was written by Information Drivers. The specification was designed to be technology neutral. This approach facilitated an independent assessment of leading data warehousing tools.

To maintain objectively, The in-house development team short listed two leading data management tools. After training in both, First National chose Group 1 Data Flow Server (formerly Sagent). The Sagent data management solution was used to develop all data processing requirements. Key to this decision was the ease of use and cost effectiveness of the technology.

The data warehouse was developed in-house under the guidance of Information Drivers.

Following successful implementation of the motor finance data warehouse:

• Data warehouse consultancy was provided to First National's consumer division
• A Business Opportunity Assessment™ was run to uncover marketing potential
• Analysis results delivered critical insight into customer preferences and behaviours
• Intermediaries analysis delivered immediately actionable direction to improve business performance

Benefits

The data warehouse delivered critical business information:

• Cross-tabulations of intermediary performance
• Quantified implications of early settlement on loan profitability
• Potential indicators of early settlement
• Customer mismatches between their credit scores and loans requested
• Misappropriation of preferential finance by dealers

Find out more about First National