While being one of the world’s largest visitor attraction operators should theoretically give plenty of economies of scale, the digital reality was different. Operating in 25+ markets, with a variety of acquired brands and different legacy systems, Merlin’s CRM setup was highly fragmented with high operational costs and license fees as a result.

They challenged Merkle to support them in delivering world-class digital experiences and embarked on a digital transformation journey, with a goal of creating seamless customer experience across the entire world of Merlin Entertainments.

They set about achieving three strategic goals to achieve this:

• Develop a unified platform that ensures a global standard.
• Establish global control with CRM orchestration by consolidating CRM efforts across attractions and markets in a single marketing automation platform.
• Seize control over customer data to allow experiences that span across borders to provide personalised, exciting and timely communication.

At the core of this project was the consolidation of websites and development of a new global web estate. Concurrently, a new Salesforce based CRM platform was defined, conceived, implemented and launched in just six months followed by complete roll out to all attractions in twelve months. To ensure control and governance throughout, the project was broken down into three phases.

• Phase one: Establishing a new data model and migrating/harmonising eight million guest profiles to Salesforce.
• Phase two: Adoption of more channels and touchpoints to facilitate better cross-channel marketing comms, followed by the creation of an analytics powerhouse utilising both GA360 and Datorama.
• Phase three: Real-time interaction with integration of Service and Sales.