ICT and e-Business Impact in the Retail Industry - empirica

e-Business in the Retail Sectortotal revenue at year-end; number of active cardholders also increased by 10%. This hasa significant impact on revenue growth since the average value of a cardholder’s basketis higher than that of customers not participating in the loyalty program. The CRM project,called ‘E-DEAL’, is part of the differentiation and customer focus strategy.The hypermarket branches serve the ‘professional groups’ segment which was created in1998. This segment includes target customers like large companies, schools, andrestaurants. It represents approximately 2% of the income of each hypermarket. Toaddress this segment, one sales person is assigned to follow up and secure loyalcustomers (in collaboration with the marketing department) in each hypermarket of theCasino Group.Prior to the implementation of the CRM tool, sales operations targeting the ‘professionalgroups’ segment were not computerised and sales people mainly used fax and paper tomanage their customer appointments and to capture sales data. There was nocentralised information system to manage this data. In order to improve datamanagement and increase profitability of sales operations, the Marketing department ofthe hypermarket branches decided to adopt a CRM solution that would:automate and simplify operational sales processessimplify in-store operational processes (mainly at the cash desks) andenable the analysis of consumer habits with the aim to better address the‘professionals group’ market segment.5.5.2 e-Business activities‘e-deal’ is the first CRM solution implemented at the Casino Group. The project waslaunched at the end of 2005 and initiated and sponsored 70 by the marketing director ofthe hypermarket branch. Following a detailed definition of project specifications, theCasino Group launched a tender process to find and select a suitable solution provider.The main requirements for the solution were to:give marketing and sales personnel a centralised tool to follow up on activitieswithin the ‘professionals group’ segmentprovide a unique customer database to sales personnel, enabling them to target,follow up and secure loyal customerscomply with budget specifications (small budget)provide an ergonomic, simple-to-use tool for users andoffer a web based tool which is easy to integrate into the existing informationsystems infrastructure.Following the selection of the solution providers (E-deal for the software and Unilog forthe integration of the solution) a development phase lasting approximately 7 monthsallowed the hypermarket branches of Casino to adapt the software to its specific needsand to engage in various test runs. Before the overall deployment of the solution, a twomonthpilot was done in three hypermarkets in France. These markets were selected dueto their diverse profiles which allowed for testing the solution in different environments.70 The project sponsor denotes the person in a company committing political capital as well asresources for a project.151