VRC Victoria Racing Club | Digital Strategy & Member Apps

CLIENT

Victoria Racing Club

Founded in 1864, Victoria Racing Club (VRC) is home to The Race That Stops A Nation™, the Lexus Melbourne Cup. Attracting a global audience, the four-day Melbourne Cup Carnival is attended by more than 300,000 visitors and watched by nearly 2 million viewers annually.

BRIEF

Long term strategy to improve services

Victoria Racing Club (VRC), in partnership with Conduct, is designing a new digital ecosystem for the Club’s members and event attendees. Through a series of innovative digital platforms, VRC customers, sponsors and partners are better connected pre, during and post event than ever before.

A trusted partner on the path to digital innovation

VRC is undertaking a multi-year customer experience transformation. The initial phase explored enhancing communication and engagement amongst the Club’s most loyal brand advocates. Since 2014, strategic design research, user testing and analytics have allowed us to craft personalised, considered digital experiences for VRC members. A refresh of the member’s portal and Raceday Guide removed pain points in the ticket and ancillary pre-arrival purchasing processes. By understanding the totality of the customer experience, we have gradually implemented fit-for-purpose solutions, catering to organisational and individual customers’ needs.

Flemington Raceday Guide

Inaugurated at the 2015 Melbourne Cup Carnival, the digital Flemington Raceday Guide reimagines fan engagement. The app includes live and replay video, mapping and wayfinding for attendees. A full race day guide and up-to-the minute public transport information is available for event-goers to access pre and during the event. Under the bonnet is a custom API and CMS, and a number of integrations including: Brightcove’s video platform, Public Transport Victoria’s timetable data and Cisco Vision Mobile.

Fashions on the Field

2015’s Melbourne Cup Carnival also saw the debut of our enterprise iOS voting management app for Fashions on the Field. The custom platform automates previously manual (paper-based) activities such as vote tallying, leaderboard creation and contestant ranking. The app delivers an efficient and accountable experience in line with the Club’s vision as a world leader in fashion and entertainment.

VRC Webstore

The VRC ecommerce webstore gives members access to information (subscriptions, balloted tickets and race schedules) during and post-racing events. In a multi-vendor engagement, Conduct performed a heavy integration into a Microsoft Dynamics CRM system and the AMIA SmartButton loyalty engine, as well as interfacing with the Westpac payment gateway and a Sitecore-driven website.

Continuously delivering high quality, innovative, customer focused, results oriented solutions; our relationship has evolved into that of a partnership. Conduct rise to the occasion and deliver every time. Gianna Mafodda Senior Digital Manager, Victoria Racing Club

Results

Adoption of a customer-centric digital strategy
Increased engagement from loyalty audience
Reduction in administrative resource requirements from digitising manual processes (Fashions on the Field staff reduced by 75%)
Decreased time to minimum viable product, through embedding behaviours in iterative prototyping