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Scenario Two: Reliance Rent-A-Car Deploys Launch Campaign

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In this scenario, Reliance Rent-A-Car decides to apply the Real-Time Offering best practice by adopting the Launch Campaign business process supported by Siebel software, within a new implementation of Siebel applications. This scenario is an example of a more complex adoption of a Siebel business process that involves customization and integration with another system.

Figure 8 shows the business process diagram for the Launch Campaign business process.

NOTE:  The business process modeled in Figure 8 is a simplified version of the actual Launch Campaign business process. The actual business process includes more steps.

Figure 8.  Launch Campaign Business Process

In rolling out the Launch Campaign business process, Reliance first determines the business goal for its Siebel implementation. Then the company figures out exactly what is needed to address this business goal and reviews Siebel business processes to determine their fit with the company's requirements. Next Reliance decides how to implement the business process solution. After that, the company configures, validates, and deploys Siebel software to support this business process solution.

Company Profile

Reliance Rent-A-Car is the largest vehicle rental company in the US in terms of revenue and number of rental transactions. Reliance has 50,000 employees at more than 5,000 offices worldwide, with 4,300 in the US. The company had revenues of $6.3 billion in fiscal year 2001.

Reliance Rent-A-Car's services include vehicle rentals to consumers, fleet management to businesses, and the sale of preowned cars to the general public. The bulk of Reliance's revenues comes from vehicle rentals.

One of Reliance Rent-A-Car's business goals is to increase market share and brand awareness as the premier rental car company, specifically in the local market rather than the airport market. Competition in the car-rental market as a whole centers around price, reliability, ease of pick-up and return, and customer service, but companies are also able to gain a competitive advantage through advertising and marketing. In recent years, there has been a downturn in US rentals and a sharp decline in travel rentals. At the same time, customers are choosing to rent cars for leisure activities and special occasions. For these reasons, rental car companies are looking to the local market for revenue opportunities.

In the local market, Reliance specializes in renting vehicles to consumers in two categories: those who need a replacement vehicle due to an accident or theft, and those who want to use a vehicle other than their own for a short business or leisure trip, such as attending a wedding or taking a family vacation. Reliance knows that the large majority of replacement rental customers are referred by insurance company claims adjusters. To attract replacement rental customers, Reliance salespeople focus on developing and maintaining relationships with insurance company staff as well as employees at local auto body shops.

The attracting of customers in the short-trip category is the focus of this scenario. Reliance's current efforts in marketing to local-market customers do not use low-cost advertising mechanisms such as email and Web offers, and the decentralized organization of Reliance's branch offices hinders marketing execution. The current marketing efforts are focused primarily around a direct mail campaign created at headquarters but executed regionally, drawing from branch office contact information and customer records. The campaign execution occurs with inconsistent timing across the country, and response is difficult to track and measure with accuracy.

The company is faced with the problem of stiff competition for local-market customers. To attract these customers and increase sales revenues, Reliance focuses on the goal of expanding and improving its marketing efforts to reach a significantly greater number of customers. Reliance meets this goal by employing multiple channels for its outbound marketing, and by making each campaign more effective through the deployment of a new implementation of Siebel applications.

Define

Defining Implementation Goals. Reliance's current business priority is to increase revenues, while maintaining its market leadership position by penetrating deeper into local markets. To determine this priority, a group of company vice presidents gathered to form an executive team to consider the problem areas affecting their business. The Reliance executive team realized that the company's competitors are heavily dependent on airport rentals, so Reliance is seeing increased competition in the local market as competing companies try to offset their decreasing airport rental revenues.

In considering their business challenges, the executive team concludes that the company can achieve deeper penetration in the local rental market by:

Better understanding customers' needs and preferences to create profitable segments
Targeting segments with personalized campaigns based on demographic data as well as customer history
Using lower-cost channels, such as the Web, to market promotions, discounts, and packages to the 95 million licensed drivers over the age of 21 in the US
Using detailed customer data from body shops to target rentals that match customer profiles (such as matching luxury rental cars with luxury car owners)
Providing higher-end luxury and sport vehicles to match special-occasion rental opportunities

The Reliance executive team determines that in order to meet these goals, they will focus on Web-based marketing in their implementation planning. Now that they have defined Reliance's implementation goals, they call in their business analyst to continue analyzing Reliance's marketing operations. Discover

Discovering Business Requirements. The business analyst reviews the business process diagrams provided in Siebel Cross-Industry Business Process Reference in order to determine which Siebel solutions address the implementation goals for achieving deeper market penetration in the local rental market. In the Marketing Business Processes section, he finds the business process diagram and reference pages for the Launch Campaign business process. This business process seems to address Reliance's implementation goals.

The Launch Campaign business process includes the following best practices that can be applied to address Reliance's marketing challenges:

Campaign Quality Control
Real-Time Offering

This scenario will limit its focus to the Real-Time Offering best practice.

The business analyst now needs to involve other individuals from functional groups within Reliance, to make sure that the Launch Campaign business process can be implemented in a way that meets the implementation goals. He needs to discover the specific business requirements for deploying this business process within the company's marketing operations.

The business analyst identifies individuals to comprise a representative sample of all the functions carried out in Reliance's marketing operations. The representative sample includes marketing managers and analysts, branch managers, IT staff, and anyone else who can provide information about the marketing business processes currently in use. Meeting one-on-one with each of these individuals, he interviews them to get answers to a number of questions, including the following:

What tactics are currently used in developing promotional offers and marketing campaigns?
What tasks do the individual branch offices perform in executing marketing campaigns?
Where do the customer lists come from, and how are they compiled?
What types of customer data is gathered and compiled? What is currently known about customer preferences and rental histories?
What types of other data on customer lists is used in existing marketing activities, such as opt-out lists, suppression lists, seed lists, and National Change of Address (NCOA) data?
What percentage of direct mail from marketing campaigns is returned as undeliverable?
What are the percentages of offers delivered for the marketing campaigns executed within the last year? These percentages are calculated using the number of offers sent, minus the number of offers returned as undeliverable.
What system is currently in place for tracking customer leads?
What are the various I.T. systems and applications currently in use for Reliance's marketing activities?
How many email and Web server resources are available for use in marketing operations?

Now the business analyst forms an implementation planning team that draws from the functional groups within Reliance that will be affected by changes to marketing operations. From within the company, he assembles a group including the vice president of outbound marketing, marketing managers from each region of the US, and a senior IT manager from Reliance's headquarters in Kansas City. The business analyst acts as project manager for this implementation planning team, and as a facilitator for the team's discussions.

The implementation planning team conducts a business requirements workshop to capture and record marketing business requirements for the new business process. The business analyst demonstrates the Launch Campaign business process for the team, and the team reviews the way it works, step by step. The team records Reliance's detailed requirements for each step in the flow. The team agrees that the Launch Campaign business process should fit Reliance's business requirements, through a discussion of the ways in which Reliance currently conducts outbound marketing.

During this discussion, the business analyst summarizes Reliance's current business process for outbound marketing, and the implementation planning team briefly reviews its flow:

Marketing managers and marketing analysts at headquarters decide on promotional offers and design a marketing campaign, consisting primarily of direct mailings to existing customers and contacts from mailing lists.
The marketing managers distribute the campaign plan and materials to regional managers in branch offices around the country.
Branch offices in all regions coordinate direct mailings, often modifying the original promotional materials as the branch managers see fit.
Branch representatives track campaign response through direct questioning of customers, usage of promotional codes by customers, and responses to customer service questionnaires completed by a small percentage of customers.
Marketing analysts from headquarters gather information and response data from branch offices quarterly, and aggregate the data using Microsoft Excel to determine response rates.
Marketing managers evaluate response rates and the information gathered from branch offices for use in future campaign planning.

The most important findings the business analyst makes in her review of the current business process are:

Campaign execution is inconsistent among branch offices. Often the promotions created by headquarters are modified by the branches, and the timing that is carefully chosen to align with the offers in the materials is often not the timing adhered to by the branch offices.
Feedback that comes directly from customers, as branch staff interact with them, is not recorded and compiled. When it is recorded, this feedback seldom reaches headquarters marketing staff.
Data gathered from branch offices is sketchy, there is not enough of it, and the numbers are difficult to aggregate because the response comes from campaign execution that varies with each branch.
Response rates seem inaccurate, due to insufficient response data.
Marketing activities are not targeted to specific market segments.

By considering Reliance's existing business process for launching a marketing campaign, the implementation planning team determines that:

Each campaign should generate significantly more response per dollar spent.
Campaigns must be executed consistently across the country, with less direct involvement of branch staff.
Marketing efforts must employ multiple channels and focus on Web offers and email campaigns in addition to direct mail.
Quality control is needed to reduce the number of offers sent to obsolete addresses and customers not specifically targeted, as well as to improve the effectiveness of each marketing campaign.
Sales, up-sell, and cross-sell rates must improve by giving branch agents detailed offer knowledge, as well as by prioritizing contacts for offers sent, and using real-time offer capabilities.

The implementation planning team determines that the Launch Campaign business process will meet their business requirements, and that Reliance can deploy the business process by making a few necessary modifications to include the company's existing reservation system.

The new marketing operations will now take the following steps:

NOTE:  The parts of the business process steps in italics replace ineffective parts of Reliance's former business process.

Design the marketing campaign.
Perform quality assurance on the planned marketing campaign.
Develop contact prioritization rules for the campaign recipients.
Brief the campaign execution team.
Prepare three separate parts to the campaign:
Prepare an email campaign.
Prepare a Web offer.
Prepare a direct mail campaign.
Approve the campaign for launch.
Execute the campaign with the following steps happening at the same time:
Send emails.
Publish Web offer.
Send direct mail offers.
Monitor performance of email, Web offer, and direct mail campaign elements.
Capture and manage campaign responses.

Design

Designing the Business Solution. The Reliance implementation planning team next creates a plan of action for deploying the Siebel business process for launching a marketing campaign, specifically for use with prospective customers in the local rental market. Focusing on the Real-Time Offering best practice, they first discuss and come to agreement on the imperative to market more effectively to more prospective customers, without significantly increasing marketing costs. They plan to implement technology that will provide low-cost, personalized marketing offers to prospective customers in targeted segments.

The team applies the Launch Campaign business process to replace Reliance's current business process for outbound marketing, using Siebel software to support the new business process.

Configure

Configuring the Siebel Implementation. Reliance uses a home-grown application to allow insurance adjusters and auto body shops to create reservations for Reliance rentals for their clients. Reliance executives and employees greatly value this system, and they want to be able to continue using it. They also want to track the business that comes to the company through this channel. They intend to extend their marketing offers to these replacement rental customers, and track responses of replacement-rental marketing offers separately from the responses to the local market campaigns.

This added requirement of marketing to replacement rental customers and allowing partners to create reservations requires customization to the Launch Campaign business process. A technical team of Reliance staff members uses Siebel Workflow to build the step in. They also configure the implementation to include an integration point with Reliance's reservation system, for order management.

Validate

Testing the Siebel Implementation. The implementation planning team has planned and configured the Siebel implementation, and before it is deployed and rolled out to the users, the configurations must be tested. The team executes the business process to make sure that it works from beginning to end. The team validates the effectiveness of the business process, and makes necessary changes until it works exactly as planned.

Deploy

Deploying the Siebel Implementation. Now that the business process has been proven to work as intended, the team deploys the implementation and the users begin operating under the new Launch Campaign business process. Within two months, the first campaign is launched as the emails and direct mailings go out, and the Web offers get published.

Implementation Results

Reliance Rent-A-Car has identified a problem, decided to address it by implementing a Siebel business process solution, and chosen Siebel applications as the supporting software. The company has implemented the Launch Campaign business process to meet the challenge of more deeply penetrating the local rental market by improving its outbound marketing operations.

Reliance has seen fast results, as the new use of Internet marketing channels has changed the way the company markets its services. The quality assurance process performed before launching each new campaign tests the readiness of the overall campaign as well as the specific channels employed, which makes all the company's marketing efforts significantly more effective.

The use of multichannel marketing strategies, as well as quality control on all offers sent to existing and prospective customers, has caused the percentage of offers delivered to jump from 68% to 96%, while the number of offers sent has increased over 400% with the addition of the email and Web marketing channels. The real-time offerings presented through the Web offers have given Reliance significant upsell opportunities, as 19% of all bookings online have taken the form of specialty rentals such as SUVs and convertibles suggested in real-time to customers based on customer input in Web site form fields. The real-time offerings also have allowed branch agents to increase their specialty-rental bookings, as the agents consider customers' response to questions as well as their prior rental histories to determine the recommendations the agents gave to customers.

Reliance achieved these sales increases while decreasing marketing costs, due to the use of low-cost email and Web marketing channels, and due to the quality control which greatly improved existing direct mail efforts.

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