National Trust Case Study

HIGHLIGHTS

Claremont’s Managed Services team reduced the support backlog of incidents, problems, and changes in the National Trust’s CRM system.

The National Trust has a new CRM System architecture which is future proofed in that it is robust and scalable for the next 5 years.

National Trust has a reliable and efficient Disaster Recovery solution in place to safeguard the continuity of service.

The CRM solution is now cheaper to maintain without compromising on service.

"Claremont is a breath of fresh air. Through their processes and ‘can do’ ethos they have delivered support environments that are of such a high quality and up-to-date - overnight in some cases - that enables us to be much more efficient in diagnosing and resolving issues. This has meant that the Trust can now start to do CRM rather than just talk about its systems."

Glen Yarwood
EBS Programme Director, National Trust

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The National Trust (NT) uses Oracle E-Business as their CRM System in order
to manage the transactions with their members.

BACKGROUND

The National Trust is a conservation charity established in 1894 to preserve and protect countryside and buildings of significance in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. A well-respected British institution, it has grown to become one of the UK’s largest charities and Europe’s largest conservation organisation.
They look after 780 miles of coastline, more than 250,000 hectares of land, over 500 historic houses, castles, parks, and gardens and nearly one million works of art.

The National Trust (NT) utilises Oracle E-Business Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Modules to manage its direct debit collection for its extensive membership base of 5.6 million members, as well as the management of donations from the wider public. These memberships and donations equate to two-thirds of NT’s annual revenue, making this CRM system business-critical.

Their in-house functional and technical delivery development team were finding it difficult to manage the amount of support and change work on their CRM System that was being directed at them.

Looking to the long-term future, the National Trust undertook a formal procurement process in order to select a new partner for the delivery of DBA and Hosting for the CRM System.

It was key that the Trust found a reliable, trusted and long-term business partner that could dovetail effectively with the in-house team to provide a high-quality and comprehensive support solution.

In 2012, Claremont was brought in to assist and help stabilise the solution by providing functional and technical resources for project delivery.

THE SOLUTION

Within a 6-month period, Claremont conducted 3 trial migrations and successfully transitioned the NT CRM system from IBM to NT’s own dedicated servers at Claremont’s hosting centre on time and within budget. During the migration, the system was moved from 32-bit to 64-bit installed on an Oracle Virtualisation platform, various components of the technology stack were upgraded, including an upgrade of the database to 11g and content management solution to Oracle Web Centre 11g, and the overall architecture was simplified.

In 2019 the dedicated servers that NT had placed at Claremont’s hosting centre had exceeded their lifespan and needed to be replaced to reduce risk to this system. Claremont proposed that NT move to host on their own Claremont Cloud™ Solution.

A Cloud With Capability

Claremont Cloud™ provides its users with a personalised, accessible, and secure Cloud hosting solution. It is a truly virtualised platform on which all Oracle business applications can be run. Operational management and technical support are provided entirely by Claremont’s specialist UK team.

Claremont Cloud™ is wholly run using Oracle’s virtualisation software. It is the only Oracle VM-powered public Cloud available in the UK, outside of Oracle themselves. Importantly, it is configured according to Oracle’s regulations, ensuring licensing compliance. And as Claremont Cloud™ is bigger, more flexible and has more capability and processing power, it’s able to provide a quicker response to changes.

NT agreed to this proposal, which was a big step for this business-critical system. Claremont conducted intensive testing and came up with innovations to ensure that the process would be smooth. The transition process went incredibly well, with no issues experienced by NT.

Reliable Service

Proactive support helps minimise issues and maintains a secure and up-to-date system that meets the Trust’s requirements for availability and performance. The support service is backed by meaningful SLAs, including guaranteed fix times. By only using experienced ITIL-trained Oracle consultants dedicated to the Managed Services role, Claremont were able to reduce the number of system issues, quickly fixing those that did occur.

THE BENEFITS AND LONG TERM GOALS

The National Trust have realised the following business benefits to their CRM system:

Simple tasks such as cloning have been improved and automated and now take 1-2 days to turn around successfully.
Claremont implemented a new and effective Backup and Disaster Recovery solution
The documented support processes included essential detail, providing important things like Security Management.
A reliable service is continually provided via dedicated staff who understand the National Trust’s business’s needs.
There have been significant cost savings to the client from streamlining and simplifying the over architected infrastructure and solutions.
The number of transactions on their direct debit collection system has increased more than twelve-fold as NT has moved its members from yearly billing to monthly billing. The membership base is continuously growing and on Claremont Cloud™ the direct debits are running faster than on the previous servers even with the increased transactions. This has been achieved both by the speed and flexibility of the Claremont Cloud™ as well as the changes and innovations implemented to the CRM system processes by the Claremont team.

The platform is stable, flexible, faster, and more reliable.
Claremont’s commitment to excellence can be seen in the 1st time resolution figures, with 97% 1st Time Resolution for DBA Support and 100% 1st time resolution for Application Support.
The solution is PCI and DPA compliant, providing peace of mind that the data is secure.
The solution is now cheaper to maintain than previously, whilst maintaining a high quality of service.

True Flexibility

Recently there was an issue with a backup at NT, these normally run over a weekend and one was delayed and ran over into the Monday. If that had happened on the previous servers, the CRM application would have fallen over. The issue was picked up by Claremont’s System Administrator due to the higher-than-normal load running on the system. Claremont Cloud™ carried this additional load with no issue and the system continued as normal with no issues raised by the users.

NT rates Claremont above 9/10 for customer satisfaction each month and based on this and other successes we are broadening our Managed Services footprint within NT.

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