Carphone Warehouse gears up for Christmas

Demand for the Apple iPhone at the Carphone Warehouse (CPW) is nothing compared to the sort of demand for phones the retailer expects in the week before Christmas. So the company is putting in place a data integration project to make sure its staff face no surprises in the festive season.

While a spokesman for CPW said the retailer shifted around 30,000 iPhones in the first day of trading, total sales of all phones could be as much as double that in the last few shopping days before Christmas.

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CPW senior project manager Bhavesh Chavda told silicon.com, peaks in customer demand across all of CPW's businesses, including telco, broadband provision and insurance, are supported by a data warehouse designed to expand quickly.

He said: "We expect no surprises this year, bandwidth is available. We have invested in virtualisation to cope with spikes in demand for information and we can rent CPUs as we need them."

Chavda added CPW has learned from the huge peak in customer demand for the organisation's broadband offer when it launched in June 2006. The company struggled to cope, mainly because of a lack of call centre resources, but it also lacked a sufficient data processing architecture to support those customer service agents.

CPW is part-way through a data integration project with Informatica to improve the availability of customer data down to the shop floor.

Chavda said: "The roadmap is to provide on-demand business data for all our managers, so that they can make appropriate decisions to cope with changes in customer demand. Within three months we were able to spin off a new set of data for the call centre operations to support the broadband offering."