Customer Relationship Management | A Retail Perspective

Explore how customer relationship management uses technology, people, and processes to build strong, long-term, profitable relationships with customers, supporting sustainable competitive advantage through loyal customers.

CRM is a business philosophy plus strategies, programs, and systems that focus on building loyalty with the most valuable customers to create a sustainable competitive advantage.

Explore important factors for CRM in retail, focusing on increasing share of wallet through value, personalized merchandise and services, and promotion, while defining loyalty as share of wallet plus commitment.

Explore how commitment and emotional attachment drive attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty, including share of wallet, to keep customers loyal amid competitor offers and price changes.

Explore why price discounts do not build customer loyalty and why such reductions are not sustainable. Learn strategies beyond price to cultivate loyal customers who speak positively about your brand.

Explore the four-step CRM process: collect data, analyze data, target customers, and develop and implement CRM programs in a cyclical, continuous approach.

Develop a retailer CRM by building customer databases through transactional data, touchpoints, preferences, demographics, and psychographics to guide personalized promotions and measure response to marketing activities.

Identify information collection practices across channels, including personalized data, loyalty programs, name-tag cards, biometrics, RFID tracking, and multi-channel integration to strengthen customer relationship.

Explore privacy concerns in customer data collection, highlighting consent, data protection, and the risks of data breaches and third-party sharing in retail marketing.

Protect customer privacy through privacy by design, ensuring retailers keep data private and practices transparent, while enabling customers to review and control what data is tracked.

Offer more discounts, special treatment, and personal attention to encourage customers to disclose more information. The diagram shows that greater benefits lead to more data in return.

Explore FTC guidelines for fair information practices: notice, consent with opt-in and opt-out, access and accuracy, and data security applied to retail customer data and breach compensation.

Analyze customer data to identify target markets by mining data in a data warehouse, forming customer clusters through segmentation, and applying data analytics or retail analytics to guide decisions.

Market basket analysis reveals what customers buy in a single occasion, using transactional data and segmentation to identify adjacencies and guide shelf design.

Learn how recency, frequency, and monetary analysis segments customers by how recently they purchased, how often they purchase, and how much they spend in a single encounter.

Explore tiered frequent shopper programs, using layers such as platinum or diamond to reward VIPs by lifetime value and non-monetary benefits, while noting high costs and uncertain loyalty impact.

Develop a tiered crm program to categorize customers by profitability, prioritize retention through personalized attention, and link customer satisfaction to retention and loyalty within a community.

Identify platinum customers at the top of the customer pyramid and apply the 80 by 20 rule to profit, guiding strategies for gold, iron, and potential customers through acquisition.

Learn how customer alchemy converts lower tier customers into higher-value ones through add on selling, upselling, and cross-selling to increase share of wallet.

Learn to manage unprofitable customers by offering less expensive products and reducing costs, while judging tenure and attitudinal loyalty for positive e-word-of-mouth ambassadors who promote your brand.