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

e-Business in the Retail Sectorinformation for accountancy. Marketing personnel can now monitor activities on a dailybasis while they got the information only once a month before the new system wasimplemented.With this new information now available, the marketing department is able to launchtargeted direct marketing campaigns by segmenting the ‘professionals group’ market.Detailed statistical sales analyses have made it possible to identify the top ten customersor the top ten products sold. The tool enables marketing personnel to analyse customerbehaviour through detailed purchase data provided by the system. Marketing efforts canbe optimised by putting efforts on specific customers; examples include securing theloyalty of regular customers or organising awareness and promotional campaigns forcustomers that did not use their card for a certain amount of time with specificpromotional actions. Before the new system was deployed, marketing actions like specificpromotional offerings were sent to a very large amount of people and these actionsremained fruitless since they were not adapted to the target public.Hypermarket logisticsOperations in the hypermarkets to manage the ‘professional groups’ segment have beencompletely automated thanks to the introduction of the loyalty card and the CRM system.This automation saves time for accountants and for customers and led to productivitygains at the tills.Another benefit results from the integration of e-deal with SAP allowing a better control ofthe customer payments. Before the implementation of the solution there was no controlpossible of non-paid bills of the customers who have certain payment facilities. Now adetailed view of the status of customer payments is provided though the solution.Hypermarket quality, hygienic, security and environment managementIn case of product retirement (for example, removing contaminated products) the Casinohypermarket branches now can exactly identify the customers who have bought theproduct to be retired and be able to quickly inform the customer.Due to the recent implementation of the system and the absence of any figures beforethe CRM solution implementation the quantitative benefits are difficult to measure at thisstage. The Casino Group however now has a tool in place that gives a situationaloverview allowing it to rapidly react to emerging quality, hygienic, security andenvironmental challenges.CRM tool usageThe Casino hypermarket branches today count about 200.000 contacts in their centralcustomer database and that 6.000 customer meetings could already been realised in 20months allowing the representatives to attract more customers.18.000 customer loyalty cards have been deployed until today which is considered to bea great result. Customer satisfaction has also increased due to the simplified shoppingprocess for loyalty cards owners.154