Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Retailing Work
Definition:
“Customer relationship management (CRM) is a comprehensive strategy to manage a
company's interaction with current and potential customers.The retailers can effectively
achieve it, if they identify the opportunities to enhance customer value.”
CRM Practiced In Retail Sector:
Your retail CRM is more than a repository of contact data and transactions. A
well-featured CRM integrated with data from your POS system can provide a complete
picture of customers, sales benchmarks, marketing campaign performance and KPIs while
predicting trends and providing a unified platform for customer service.
Role Of CRM In Retail Business
Customer history
CRM stores all the customer information and profile like their last purchase, business cards,
phone numbers. This helps in recording all the history of a customer so you know each one of
them individually and you know who are your regular customers and what are their needs.
Which also helps you in for seeing the demands and getting better business and makes the
customers”™ experience better at your store.
Segmenting
Collecting all the information about the customers allows it to put your customers in different
section so you can attend them accordingly. This way you can segment your market. There
might be families, youngsters, vegetarian, non vegetarian, new buyers, long term customers,
heavy purchase customers, lighter purchase customers, etc. The segmentation in your market
helps you in providing better strategy that suits your customers.
Tracking
CRM software helps you in tracking all the customers individually. This provides you the
clear information as to which customers are beneficial for you and which are not. And which
customers have proven to be loyal which have not. So you can also provide them better
service and at times reward your loyal customers to keep up their loyalty and get more buyers
indirectly.
Promotions
Promotions helps you target the right audience as it tracks each customer. Therefore you can
manage them putting in groups or even individually. This will help you provide them better
service. And when a customer visits your website you can accordingly look into what they
are looking for and include the promotion of that particular product in their newsletter. For
example you have a sports related store and a customer looked into some fitness wear hence
you can include the promotion of that product in their newsletter or emails, etc.
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Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Retailing Work
Purchase tracking
CRM allows you to track each customer”™s purchase separately so you know their interests
and if their product had any issue or any damage. This way you will be able to provide them
better service by having their interests included in their sms and emails or newsletters. In case
of damage or issue you will be able to provide them with the same item in lower price in their
next purchase or even give free service, etc to provide them to gain more customer
satisfaction.
Loyalty
CRM allows you to focus on each customer individually hence you can pay attention to their
needs more closely. This way you can also focus on your long term customers and provide
them with points, bonuses and rewards which will help you gain customer loyalty. This way
you can have better business as loyalty will bring you committed customers which will set
the level of your sale and profit in the right track.
Cost effective
It allows you to manage the customers in the most cost effective way. You can send out bulk
sms and email easily updating them about the upcoming sale, offers and also allows you to
take care of them individually by focusing on their individual needs. CRM implementation is
a simple and cost effective process it also saves you more income as you will have have
lesser staff and lesser resources to spend on.
New buyers
CRM does not only manage your old customers or existing customers for you. It also has an
intelligence that helps you identify potential buyers and convert them into leads which can
turn into customers. CRM can help you get their attention by identifying them for your sales
department who can then go ahead and deliver their interests to them from your business”™
side with sophistication so they show up at your door soon.
Benefits of CRM in Retail
A retailer’s relationship with their customer is key to repeat store visits, brand loyalty and
ultimately sales conversions.
But how do you go about creating a winning formula? How can you engage consumers in
today’s multi-channel environment, be it through a website, social media channels or in store,
to keep them coming back?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in retail isn’t a new concept, but it’s one that
could help retailers win the battle for sales in these competitive times. Tesco introduced their
loyalty Clubcard in 1995, collecting data on shoppers and using the information to
personalise discounts and rewards. Fast forward 21 years and the majority of retailers offer
some kind of reward or loyalty program with Marks & Spencer being the latest to launch
their Sparks card, a new ‘Members Club’ which includes bespoke offers and priority access
to sales for those that sign up.
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Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Retailing Work
How To Improve Your Customer Relationship Management
It’s no longer enough to have a bricks and mortar store and hope that people will visit and
spend their hard earned cash on impulse buys. Customers need to be enticed in to the store,
given a reason to visit and a reason to stay and shop. Retailers need to create a welcoming
environment as well as an experience for their customers.
Having an accurate retail CRM database that is focused on the customer is an integral part of
the jigsaw for any retailer. Consumers are savvy, demanding and often in a hurry, so a
successful retail CRM system will pay dividends when it comes to building loyal customers.
Retailers need to think smarter to engage shoppers and create loyalty towards their brand, and
to do this they need to know as much as possible about them.
Birthdays? Send a voucher offering a discount once a year. Not seen a customer for a while?
Send an email with the latest news and products available. Regular customers? Invite them to
an exclusive event.
How to develop retail CRM
A good retail CRM system can help build loyalty, creating brand ambassadors who will
happily spread the word about their positive customer experience. Get it wrong and they’ll be
even more vocal about a bad customer experience.
There are several ways to collect information to build a successful CRM database. Many
retailers ask for an email address when you purchase in-store, others offer the latest news and
discounts by signing up to their newsletter online or by developing customer chat rooms and
communities. Whatever the means of data capture, if the right questions are asked, retail
marketing campaigns can be targeted to the individual, not just personalised but also targeted
to the right gender, location and even specific products of interest.
Using a database to personalize products, discounts and events for consumers is crucial to
creating repeat customers who are keen to engage with a brand and shout about the benefits
of signing up.
And it’s not just stores that offer personal, targeted marketing and customer relationship
management. The leisure industry offers a host of benefits when you stay loyal to their brand,
think Avios miles, Hilton Honours rewards, credit card points and even Starbucks rewards
cards – they all want repeat customers who they know better, and they’re willing to go the
extra mile to get them.
To find out more about the importance of customer relationship management, as well as
improving customer relations and footfall, please visit our queue management and customer
experience pages.
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Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Retailing Work
FIVE EXAMPLES OF CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
We’ve pulled together five examples of customer relationship management techniques made
better with the use of a sophisticated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool like
Microsoft Dynamics. Utilizing software to streamline, automate, and organize all client
functions will help your teams function more effectively and concentrate more completely on
their most important job—keeping the customer satisfied.
1. CRMs help by automating a consistent response whenever customer contact occurs.
That could be a simple thank you or a survey to gauge your effectiveness. This is an
excellent example of customer relationship management—it helps you keep the
conversation going. It can also help you respond more quickly to an emailed
complaint by sending an immediate response saying, “We’re on it!”
2. Business Analytics are the hottest thing since the Internet, and a CRM like Microsoft
Dynamics can spot trends before they escalate. One of our favorite examples of
customer relationship management is using a CRM to analyze customer segments
experiencing a specific product problem. A CRM can help you potentially fix the
issue before it accelerates into a company-wide problem.
3. A more specific example includes the case of Wells Fargo, a financial services
organization with more than 70 million customers. They use their CRM as a way to
connect and manage client social media responses along with improving their
response time to customer questions. Wells Fargo utilizes CRM software through the
cloud to provide the most effective customer service and streamlined efficiencies
across the enterprise.
4. CIO magazine suggests using your CRM to track customer activity throughout their
lifecycle—from prospect to existing client upsell. Tracking key behaviors from social
media posts to content click rates on an email campaign will help your
company understand what’s important to customers and what isn’t.
5. Improving customer relationship management means having the efficiency of syncing
between mobile phones, calendars, reporting, and other client
interactions. Having a CRM that goes where you go will improve the customer
experience. At the same time, syncing data across applications will lessen duplicate
work. A CRM should allow you to move between multiple platforms while updating
data in real-time.
The good news is that many of these sophisticated processes are automated in customer
relationship management platforms, also called customer management systems (CMS), like
Microsoft Dynamics.
What is a customer management system? Why is automating your customer relationship
management so important? Let’s look at how Dynamics can improve the power of your
marketing and sales teams while keeping in constant contact with potential customers so that
when they’re ready to buy, they’ll think of you first.
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