A major tech tune-up at Camping World gives customers a smooth ride

Camping World, a $6 billion RV business headquartered in Lincolnshire, Illinois, sells, services, and furnishes RVs to provide customers with comfortable and dependable journeys. And internally, the corporate journey for Sruti Patnaik came in early 2023 when she became the company’s CIO following a significant spike in sales resulting from the 2020 pandemic. Patnaik inherited a strong business model, dedicated team, and faithful customers, but due to a history of acquisitions, the systems architecture needed an overhaul. So she and her team developed a novel systems integration approach to improve near-term employee and customer experiences while building their future architecture.

What is the current transformation climate like at Camping World?

The business has grown rapidly both organically and through mergers and acquisitions; we acquired 19 dealerships just last year. As a result of these and new dealerships, we have a potpourri of old, new, and acquired systems and processes. So the first stage of our transformation is to consolidate technology, standardize processes, and optimize costs so we can drive greater revenue and deliver an even better experience to our customers.

How do those drivers translate into your technology strategy?

Our potpourri of processes is also a potpourri of inherited technologies. We’re building a new architecture that will meet the needs of the future, but while we’re reimagining the entire stack, we can also provide value today. To do that, we’re taking a unique approach to systems integration.

Our core business is selling RVs and we use a mix of old and new systems, some of which are homegrown and some are commercial software. Our processes are similar to those supported by commercial car dealer management systems, but different enough that we’ve had to customize them. The core system is the dealer management system, which I describe to my team and colleagues as the sun in the solar system.

Historically, we couldn’t integrate the many systems, like salesforce, lead management, and finance, that talked to the sun, which meant our dealership staff had to do double, triple, or even quadruple data entry. To solve this problem, we created a wrapper, a User Experience Hub that wraps around the sun, so the newer planets can talk to the legacy planets, and to the sun, without doing a multi-million-dollar rip and replace. Using this wrapper to connect the planets to each other and to the sun allowed us, for the first time, to integrate these systems.  

What was key to making the integration strategy a success?

Our first step was to understand what systems people were using and how the systems were talking to each other. For this phase of the project, my team and I had to forget we were in technology. We spent hours in the dealerships so we could understand the business processes, identify the gaps and empathize with employees there. We were able to see, for example, that dealership agents needed to swivel their chair to enter information into multiple systems, so we saw opportunities for data entry errors.

Once we were able to map how the information was flowing through systems, we could say, “Here’s my sun and here are the planets, but not all the planets are talking to the sun.  This planet has this technology, but the sun has that technology.” Then, when we knew what we needed to integrate, we used a plethora of technology. We used APIs when they could work, and we brought in RPA automation to save time on data entry.

How did you keep your business partners engaged during this change?

What we were trying to do was very new for the business, so we decided to take a crawl, walk, run approach, where we gave some value to the business operators along the way so they’d stay engaged. This was a challenge, because so much of the integration work was on the back end. If I told our business operators we’re setting a foundation for great integration, they’d be polite, but they’d roll their eyes.

So, what did we give them? We were able to reduce the time to close a deal by at least 15 minutes. That might seem small, but when you multiply that by the number of deals you do a year, we were able to save about 30,000 hours.

What are examples of technology solutions that can run on this new architecture?

In the last 18 months, as inflation increased, our used RV business has improved.  Traditionally, this is how the process worked: the owner calls a dealership and says, “I want to sell my RV.” The agent asks a few questions about the model and its condition and gives the customer a quote, say $20,000, as an example.

The owner feels good about that, and the family travels to reach a dealership so the technicians can do a full inspection. But perhaps they find the roof leaks and tell the customer the sale price is only $9,000. Think about the experience of the customer who traveled a long way for $20,000, but now only gets $9,000.

To solve this problem, we rolled out a mobile app for our used RV technicians. Now, customers can call the dealership or communicate their interest in selling their RV through an online channel. The mobile app sends a message to the mobile technicians, which is picked up by someone close to the customer location. The technician does the inspection at the customer’s location, uploads the pictures and videos, and in minutes, the information is at the dealership. So with the inspection report in hand, the dealership can provide a quote that goes back to the customer. The customer then drives to the dealership to pick up the check, or we can send them a hauler if they don’t want to make the trip. How beautiful is that customer experience?

How do you make sure your IT team understands the business well enough to develop this kind of solution?

This has been a major focus for me over the last 12 months. When I came in, we didn’t have an architecture team. We had domain architects who knew certain areas of the business such as the RV business and core technology. But nobody was stitching it together. So, I hired a very senior leader, and for the first time in the company’s history, we have an enterprise architecture team.

I’ve mandated for my team that we work in the dealerships, our distribution centers, and our offices. IT doesn’t exist for IT’s sake. We exist to enable the business. How can we design solutions for the business if we don’t live in their shoes?

The goal is to expose the IT team to the entire business so it can leave silos and see the bigger picture. This perspective needs to be in our DNA. That’s the cultural shift I’m bringing about in IT, and it won’t happen overnight. IT people have the tendency to ask, “How high?” when their business partners ask them to jump. We want our IT team to ask, “Why do you want me to jump? What is the goal of the jump? How does my jumping impact the customer?” We’re changing our mindset from engineering to customer impact, and kudos to my team for joining me on this journey.