Postal Museum

In November 2016, Culture Consultants were commissioned by the Postal Museum to undertake a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) review in advance of the opening of the new museum in summer 2017.

The main purpose of the review was to define a CRM strategy and build an understanding of CRM across the organisation to ensure the Museum could build long-term relationships with its customers. The Museum was keen to capitalise on the anticipated impact of its opening by being prepared strategically and systematically. Central to the outcomes were recommendations on how to harness and develop new visitor relationships to drive repeat visits, advocacy, engagement and revenue generation via the development of a coherent CRM programme.

In a three-phase project we first reviewed strategic documents and met key stakeholders to understand business capabilities, determine the Museum’s high-level strategy, objectives and priority areas for CRM in the initial year’s trading, and to articulate the Museum’s strategy for CRM.

In the second phase we reviewed operational planning for Front of House service delivery, mapped data holdings to understand overlaps, usefulness, historic and potential usage, and assessed existing systems’ implementations and integrations with other Museum solutions that contain customer data.

The third phase made CRM recommendations for the short and medium term, planned CRM activities over an 18 month period, recommended ways to engage and retain customers and Members, and recommended tactics for the capture and management of data in a marketable database.

All recommendations took into account factors which would impact on the Museum’s ability to deliver any changes against the short time-frame running up to opening, the available resources and existing capabilities, the existing systems’ functionality and the ability to create integrations between applications.

Harry Huskisson, Head of Communications and Marketing, said:

“Opening a new attraction brings a whole host of challenges, not least how we can effectively manage and grow our relationships with customers across the organisation. We want to ensure we get this right from day one to make it as easy and enjoyable as possible, both for us and our customers. Culture Consultants have helped us better understand the internal and external challenges we need to overcome to successfully manage these relationships and provided a possible roadmap for implementing a long-term CRM solution. With this in place, we can move forward with confidence.”