Royal Automobile Club of Victoria (RACV)

“For me personally, the business agility we’ve gained from Salesforce is the highlight of what we’ve achieved and has already helped us become far more responsive to the needs of our members and the organisation.”

Idris Shamsi | CIO

~20%

INCREASE IN ONLINE CONVERSION ACROSS CORE PRODUCTS

~20%

INCREASE IN ONLINE CONVERSION ACROSS CORE PRODUCTS

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RACV transforms the member experience

The Royal Automobile Club of Victoria (RACV) is the largest member organisation in Victoria. It was founded over 100 years ago as a social club for motorists and now offers a range of products and services such as emergency roadside and home assistance, insurance, resorts, other travel services and a fast-emerging sustainable energy business.

As a member-based organisation, RACV aims to anticipate members’ needs and provide them with the best experience possible in their interactions with the organisation. The desire to enhance and personalise this experience were major drivers for RACV to transform, as was the need for efficiency and agility.

“The automotive industry is continually evolving and we need to think about what RACV will look like in the next 20 years,” said Simon Baldock, Head of Salesforce and Integration at RACV. “The growth of our home business is a big focus and Salesforce is key to that. From a technology perspective, our business and technology transformation has given us a greater ability to drive change.”

Delivering a unified member experience

RACV has more than two million members and the primary goal of its transformation was to improve their overall experience. In particular, it wanted to equip frontline teams to deliver more personalised support and enable greater ease of engagement through unassisted, digital channels.

“The idea was to give our frontline teams a richer and deeper understanding of our members, including their product holdings and interactions. In turn, they should be able to anticipate member needs and provide a much better experience,” said Idris Shamsi, CIO at RACV.

For RACV to achieve this it had to move away from its legacy systems. Many were near-obsolete and employees had to move between four or five systems just to complete one task. Salesforce Customer 360, on the other hand, offered an integrated platform on which RACV could consolidate a lot of its processes. It also provided an easy path to adoption with free learning available through Trailhead.

“With Trailhead, Salesforce can be self-learned and that’s been key to how quickly we’ve transitioned our workforce away from our legacy systems and onto Salesforce,” said Shamsi.

RACV went live with Salesforce early in the COVID-19 pandemic, providing it with a timely solution to navigate change and support members from anywhere.

Contact centre agents are now using Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, providing a single view of members and helping to orchestrate the delivery of services like roadside assistance and insurance. In addition, whether a member calls up to purchase a new product or enquires about an existing one, they can expect to receive more personalised support. For example, the agent can see right away if the member has initiated a quote online or if they’ve received any recent offers or promotions.

Members can now access support via live-chat as well which is part of RACV’s enhanced digital experience. Experience Cloud underpins new mobile responsive websites which offer authenticated and unauthenticated access to a range of resources, and most notably RACV’s all-new Member Portal that allows RACV’s members to complete end-to-end transactions online including acquiring new products and servicing existing products. Members are now able to login and self-serve using their email address as opposed to their membership number which has resulted in an average of 30,000 more logins per month.

RACV has further increased digital engagement by using Marketing Cloud to personalise communications using segments and behavioural information. These communications include journeys to welcome members and drive renewals and help people get more value from their membership. These journeys have resulted in 15% higher open rates on emails and 4% higher click-through rates.

Baldock shared that while RACV has yet to unlock the full potential of personalisation, it’s already seeing some incredible results with conversion as high as 20% across its core products. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) on its digital channels has also tripled.

Increasing agility and reliability

Another goal for RACV has been to improve efficiency and it's working towards this by centralising more of its operations onto the Salesforce platform. RACV has used Heroku to build and deploy an application that manages the member lifecycle. The application is key for compliance and ensures members receive the right benefits according to their subscription or membership tier.

RACV has also adopted a number of solutions from the Salesforce AppExchange which streamline processes and provide a complete view of the business from one platform. These include Conga CPQ, Conga Composer, and FinancialForce as well as OwnBackup and Remora Backup which have strengthened disaster recovery.

MuleSoft is another key element in RACV’s digital journey and was originally brought into the organisation to rationalise its applications onto a single unified platform. The MuleSoft platform now supports 400 integrations connecting a range of satellite systems to the Salesforce ecosystem. These include RACV’s emergency assist distribution system, its insurance underwriting system, its travel management reservation system, and its SAP general ledger.

Having all of these solutions integrated on one platform has contributed towards a more stable IT environment and markedly improved the performance and stability of its member-facing services. The API-led connectivity approach has also reduced complexity within RACV’s technology environment and helped to accelerate the deployment of new features and fixes.

In fact, by embracing a more modern DevOps framework, RACV is now delivering around seven releases per quarter as opposed to two releases annually. This gives the business and technology team more capacity to innovate and deliver new initiatives to improve the member experience.

“For me personally, the business agility we’ve gained from Salesforce is the highlight of what we’ve achieved and has already helped us become far more responsive to the needs of the organisation and our members,” said Shamsi.