Rent-A-Center Builds A Customer-Centric Organization

Rent-A-Center (RAC) provides people with an easy and affordable way to furnish their home. For the last 30 years, RAC Stores have offered an assortment of name-brand products to customers with flexible payment options and no debt.

It’s more than just a retail chain, Rent-A-Center was born out of the desire to serve the needs of customers who had limited cash or credit to buy the products they wanted and needed. From this simple idea, RAC has grown into a $3 billion company. Today, it serves more than a million customers across the nation, as well as Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico.

THE CHALLENGE
In 2015, Rent-A-Center wanted to expand beyond traditional research methods like focus groups or extensive quantitative studies, and explore other research options that were more suitable to quick turn-around times.  As Shilpa Damle, the Director of Consumer Insights explains, "We simply weren't getting the real-time feedback we needed. By the time we answered simple questions, decisions were already being made."

So Shilpa, along with her consumer insights team, began exploring innovative solutions that could deliver rapid and robust, customer feedback while staying in line with their budget. They also considered that Rent-A-Center is a relation-ship-oriented business. The feeling that customers could become an extension of the Rent-A-Center marketing team was an important aspect to their explorations.

Partnering with Passenger Inc. and using the FUEL CYCLE platform, Rent-A-Center developed a new online community called the "RAC Inner Circle." Right from the start, the platform’s ease of use amazed Shilpa and her team. 

“The advanced reporting and dashboard features helped us to not get lost in the data and allowed us to really focus on leveraging the insights across the organization and through various departments … from operations to customer support,” Shilpa said.

But what surprised them the most was how easily and rapidly the use of RAC Inner Circle spread across the organization.  What started out as a marketing department initiative is now taking hold in other departments across the company with future plans for expansion.

“We have merchandising teams trying to find the right product for the customers, pricing teams trying to gauge the correct price point, marketing teams making sure we are sending the right message to the right people at the right time, and the list goes on and on,” said the Director of Direct Marketing, Bridget Griffin.

As more and more departments leverage RAC Inner Circle, the focus quickly expanded beyond merely collecting consumer insights.  

“The quest at the end of the day is not really just to sell products, but to be in service of our customers, and the community enables us to have a back and forth dialogue with our members,” Shilpa said.

Overtime, the community has helped build a more customer-centric approach to decision making. FUEL CYCLE turned the customer-mar-keter interaction into real –time dialogue, which in turn could yield a leg up on the competition.