The RAC Fuels AI Ambitions, Reaches Insights Faster By Consolidating Data

The RAC is a household name in the United Kingdom, providing roadside assistance to motorists for more than 125 years. 

Today, the company serves millions of customers and provides a range of additional services, from vehicle insurance and servicing to repairing vehicles at home or at work. Customers can access all of this through a seamless, app-based experience — part of a digital initiative that’s been years in the making. 

“We’ve been on a journey to overhaul our data use across the organization, so users can access more services and get a much better customer experience,” says Elliott Crush, Director of Engineering at RAC. “Our goal is to place data at the heart of everything the RAC does and be the number one provider of those driving services across the U.K.”

To achieve this goal, the RAC adopted Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to unite disparate data silos and give customers and internal users access to key data. 

“Using Snowflake, we’ve seen a massive step change in our ability to provide data to those who need it,” Crush says. “Bringing all of our data into one place has really changed what’s possible for us as an organization.”

Like many companies with a long history, the RAC suffered from a lack of unified insight, as over the years, different divisions across the business relied on their own technologies and data sets. With such disparate processes and applications all running in parallel, the company found that wider, all-encompassing business initiatives were much more difficult to execute. 

“There was no data continuity, and therefore no trust in what was being built," Crush says. “We knew we needed to get all our data in one place so it could be consumed by different areas of the business with everyone telling the same story.”

When searching for data to provide this single, central source of truth, Snowflake presented several advantages over the competition. One of them was the Snowflake Marketplace, a resource which shares nearly 3,000 data and AI products and apps from more than 680 third-party providers.

With hands-on access to data that can augment its own insights, the RAC has been able to use information, such as weather pattern data, to improve breakdown predictions and provide more responsive services to its customers. Snowflake also makes it easier for the RAC to share data with its partners through its collaboration features.

“A lot of our partners already use, or are thinking of using, Snowflake,” says Crush. “Sharing data with other parties and creating the ecosystems that are needed for that to happen is usually a big cost, so having a common pool of data and easy sharing across our partners in Snowflake is great.”

In addition, the data cloud’s limitless scalability and seamless integration with RAC’s existing Azure architecture positioned Snowflake as the right platform to support the company’s current and future ambitions. 

“The scalability is a huge benefit,” says Crush. “We had annual concerns over having too much data, and often needed to purge records purely for the sake of maintaining compute performance. We don't have any of those limitations anymore, which is perfect.”

Since migrating to Snowflake, one of the most high-impact use cases for the RAC has been the creation of a unified insights platform for the hundreds of agents who work in its operations hub.

Those agents are responsible for taking calls, managing interactions, identifying customer locations and policy types, and dispatching recovery crews. However, the number of variables required to service these conversations can be huge, and gaining a complete picture of any given situation grows more complex when data related to different factors is stored on numerous systems. 

“It was time-consuming and more difficult than it should have been,” Crush says. “We knew we needed a centralized management system to surface information quickly so we could make our agents’ lives easier and improve customer experiences.”

The solution was MAVIS, a single pane of glass application that presents agents with everything they need to know at a glance. MAVIS pulls relevant information from Snowflake’s data warehouse in seconds through an API and summarizes it using Cortex AI. By empowering agents with MAVIS, the RAC has reduced call handling times by 30% — translating to millions of pounds of annual cost savings — while also driving faster and better decision-making, improved customer experiences and simplified onboarding for new agents. 

“The way Cortex takes the data and turns relatively abstract, complicated notes into single-line summaries is a huge benefit for our agents,” says Crush. “And it’s really easy for us to do as part of standard SQL querying. We haven't had to connect that to another compute engine or a different cloud provider or do lots of integrations. It massively reduces the barrier to entry to AI.”

Since the RAC started using Snowflake, technical and nontechnical users across the organization have been able to surface data at speed and at scale, which means the business can take the right actions more quickly and ultimately better serve its customers. 

“Time to insight has massively improved,” says Crush. “Our analytical teams used to take two or three months to identify a problem, get data into the right systems and solve it. With Snowflake, it takes three or four days. We’ve also reduced the manual maintenance burden of keeping all these data integrations fresh because Snowflake’s monitoring and alerting is so mature.”

It’s not just a case of technological advantages though. The relationship RAC has built with Snowflake has blossomed into a true partnership, with support from the data cloud experts only ever a phone call away.

“Snowflake’s experts are always available and always have the information we need,” says Crush. “They’re very proactive in monitoring our usage and suggesting ways we can optimize our approach. They genuinely care about helping us meet our business objectives, and they’ve helped us with training, embedding best practices, exploring new developments and so much more.”

With silos eradicated and all its data consolidated in one place, the RAC has a robust platform on which it can add new capabilities in the future — providing tangible benefits to both the RAC and its customers. 

“Our collaboration with Snowflake gives us centralized data available in real time, which has unlocked real cost savings in the organization alongside driving better customer experiences through our customer app, myRAC,” says Jo Baker, Chief Finance Officer at the RAC.  

Chris Astall, Chief Product & Technology Officer at RAC elaborates: “With Snowflake, we’ve transformed how we use data across the RAC, enabling us to deliver smarter, more personalised experiences for our members. By unifying our data, we can better predict breakdowns, enhance our service offerings and ultimately provide more value through our digital channels. And it’s just the beginning…”

Going forward, RAC plans to use Snowflake and its ever-expanding list of features to help quickly identify customers who are most in need of help, extend data sharing with partners and embed data-driven practices in every corner of the company’s digital estate. 

The company also plans to implement AI where appropriate, something that’s made easier thanks to Cortex — a one-stop-shop for generative AI. “Our data-first approach is allowing us to quickly leverage the benefits of AI and continue to drive innovation and efficiency across our breakdown, insurance, and SMR businesses,” says Astall.  

“We’re just very pleased to be part of an ecosystem that allows us to dip into the AI functionality as and when it appears,” adds Crush.

For now though, the RAC will continue its long tradition of helping road users in need — and it will do so with data at the heart of every activity. 

“With Snowflake we’ve got a living, breathing system that delivers real commercial value to the organization,” says Crush. “We’ve gone from having various technologies that didn’t deliver value together, to having data running through every vein of the business.”