Coral Racing case study: One Cloud Cisco

Gala Coral Group is one of Europe’s pre-eminent betting and gaming businesses with strong market positions and well-established brands on the high street and online.

The Group’s operations primarily focus on the UK and Italy – the two most attractive gambling markets in Europe. Coral is the third largest retail bookmaking business in the UK, with a well-recognised brand of retail outlets.

Coral Racing needed to harmonise and update internal communications at both the head office and across their 1,750 UK shops. Existing communications operated on three separate systems, making it hard for staff and customers to get the needed information.

Coral takes pride in treating every customer as an individual, making it easy for them to place bets and to play on its machines, so that every visit to a shop is exciting. 

Customers regularly place bets on scenarios where odds aren’t publicly quoted. In the past, when retail staff called the headquarters for those odds, customers were kept waiting too long for the information as Coral’s systems struggled to find the right person.

Like many retailers, Coral Racing’s shops were struggling to differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive market. Minimal investment in recent years has hindered business development. The emergence of online betting and the growth in smartphone applications threatened the need for a high street presence. The units themselves had tills that were hard to manage, and administration instructions and guidance on things like window displays were still being mailed to the units.

The business agreed that a major multi-channel transformation programme was required to streamline retail operations and transform the customer experience. The aim was to offer retail shops and internet services that complement each other – giving customers a truly unique experience, and they asked BT to help them.
 

The new IT platform gives Coral the flexibility to deliver innovative products and services in the future, through a multichannel approach where online services work hand in hand with the shops to create genuine differentiation in the market.

It has already been scaled up to support new sites and will increase to incorporate around 1,200 users - with a possible further 3,500.

BT and Coral Racing are now working to extend the new contact centre platform to incorporate a number of group contact centres. 

Coral plans to enable multiple group operating companies to utilise a single unified communications architecture. The companies will retain their business autonomy, and the group will benefit from a more efficient and productive way of communicating.

In addition to the contact centre programme, Coral plans to extend their communications functionality to include Cisco Jabber to give retail staff instant messaging (IM) capability along with presence and click-to-call functionality.