The Q312 BMI India Retail Report forecasts that total retail sales will grow from Rs22.5 trillion this year to Rs28 trillion by 2016, a rise of nearly a quarter. Little wonder then that retailers are investing in technologies like CRM to ensure that they retain and grow their customer base. These are exciting times for retail CRM, with innovations and breakthroughs delivering immense potential to retailers as they seek to bring newexperiences to customers while building stronger engagement with their brands. New technologies like clienteling, real-time engagement and customer lifecycle management are giving a positive boost to sales and marketing initiatives. CRM has developed from a simple process of keeping customers informed to its role today, which is centred on making customers feel special — the foundation of the retail code. CRM applications equip retailers to manage, engage, influence, motivate and analyse their customers across all channels profitably. “To do this CRM technologies allow retailers

to mine extensive customer profile and transaction data to recommend exact, focused and targeted coupons, promotions and campaigns across all channels,” explains Shijo Sunny Thomas, of Fujitsu Consulting India. “These are delivered through integrated campaign execution tools that deliver personalised messages through email and mobile media. Promotions can also be delivered through proximity-based devices, wherein stores broadcast promotions to shoppers’ mobilephones within a defined location. Mobile furthers the shopper experience by enabling stock ordering, product information, augmented reality, mobile payments and coupons. Retailers have extensively implemented loyalty management in order to invite repeat custom. “The next level of CRM applications provides integrated loyalty management, allowing shoppers to earn and redeem loyalty points uniformly across all channels.

Social CRM technologies are also playing a big role in capturing customer feedback on product or brand experiences. The sheer volume of data generated by social media interactions requires distillation by technologies that handle big data analytics. ”Tablets and smartphones are great clienteling tools to proactively engage customers by offering them personalized services while they are in the store. “These can add an additional 5-10 per cent to annual sales," asserts Aneesh Reddy, cofounder of Capillary Technologies. “Many retail stores across the world have implemented this successfully by putting these instruments in the hands of their sales staff, allowing them to access a customer’s entire purchase history by simply entering his or her information and then helping with known preferences. In many restaurants, the staff are using these devices to check what customer has ordered in the past and recommend dishes which will be more appealing to them.” According to Shashi Saurav, of Sales Babu, “CRM directly affects retail supply chain management [SCM] because a competitive market requires a highly disciplined supplier base. CRM has changed the game when you focus on suppliers because SCM is based on sales order booking, which gives great clarity in product movement and also makes a company focus on streamlining its secondary sales at retail stores, and dealer management.” One for Consumers With so many channels of engagement available, retailers are fast adopting integrated CRM solutions to help them

create and manage an end-to-end customer engagement programme .

"These solutions are a great way to combine all your marketing and sales activities and maximise revenue per customer effectively," says Reddy. “Retailers who use CRM have witnessed a five- to seven-per cent growth in sales within the first six to 12 months of implementation. Using an integrated approach, retailers can identify and connect with customers over social platforms, make them their brand ambassadors and incentivise them for mentioning their brand in posts, sharing your posts or generating likes.” The rich data information gained from this can be used by analytics to generate powerful insights that should further help with personalised advertising and better loyalty reward offers. Add a customer lifecycle model to this data and you have a very potent plan to reach out and influence your customers throughout the year. Reddy says that while a plain bulk campaign can generate three per cent in sales, a customer lifecycle based campaign has the potential to at least double this figure. “And this is just the beginning; integrated CRM can add many other customer engagement initiatives and

increase its impact exponentially,” he adds. CRM applications at the most basic level ensure that customer profile and transaction data is centralised and accurate. This helps retailers to provide efficient and consistent customer service while creating a seamless customer experience. These applications also help retailers to derive trends and insights from customer data, resulting in a better understanding of habits and shopping patterns. Retailers can then focus more attentively towards multiple subsets of their customer population by creating a large pool of repeat business. On a Cloud Cloud technology has enabled retailers to rapidly adopt CRM with minimal investment in infrastructure. Top-of-the-line products, such as SugarCRM, offer subscription-based solutions on public and private Clouds; the end users need nothing more than a web-browser to access the system. Cloud technology not only ensures data security and built-in disaster-recovery mechanisms, but it also allows for a anytime-anywhere access to users across the entire retail and distribution chain on a range of devices including laptops, PCs, mobile phones and tablets. One recent example of this technology is SoCoMoLo (Social Cloud Mobile Location).

“A Cloud-based CRM application, integrated with POS systems, allows a retailer to make sure that a sale is consummated by offering real-time contextual offers and suggestions that take into account the customer’s prior history and social media activity. Another benefit in having a Cloud solution is that it allows the retailer to expand in a much more cost-effective manner," says Salil Godika of Happiest Minds. Retailers can also look at integrating niche Cloud CRM applications to augment their core relationship management capabilities. For example, a retailer using its ERP application’s CRM module can integrate it into niche CRM applications for reviews and ratings, social media integration and customer analytics. Cloud CRM solutions ensure that even small- and medium-sized retailers harness the benefits of their customer data at attractive and flexible pricing options. Platforms from Cloud CRM providers, such as Salesforce, not only offer retailers fully scalable Software-as-a-Service CRM, but also a platform to develop its custom CRM applications. Return on Investment

The value of CRM is easily measurable by looking at each customer’s lifetime value by taking into account all of his or her transactions. In addition to lifetime value, customer capital can be measured by including activities such as reviews and ratings, social media endorsements and recommendations, and this improves customer equity. These factors form the basis of calculating ROI, and retailers can use them to set benchmarks in light of the CRM investments they have made. “Calculating the investment side of ROI is comparatively easy," says Indraneel Fuke, director of Bhea Technologies. “One needs to factor in recurring costs, such as software licences and subscriptions, and onetime costs, like CRM implementation, hardware — which are zero for Cloudbased CRM — and training costs.” However, calculating the return side of ROI requires a little more effort. There needs to be clarity over the business objectives a retailer sets out to achieve through CRM — these objectives could be set at increasing customer retention by 30 per cent through being more responsive to feedback; or increasing the wallet share of existing customers by a quarter by identifying

cross-selling opportunities; or possibly increasing new customer acquisition by 50 per cent by reaching out to a new target audience. You can evaluate the effectiveness of your CRM by measuring the additional sales it generates. “To demonstrate this, we use Test & Control methodology to measure the impact," says Reddy. “In this process, a group of customers with the same characteristics are identified and split into two groups — a test group containing most of them and a control group with the remainder. The test group is exposed to communication designed using an integrated CRM approach, while the control group does not receive any targeted communication and relies instead on conventional methods of messaging, like newspaper & TV ads, to influence their purchasing decisions. The purchasing behaviour of these groups are then evaluated for a defined period on parameters like rate of response per campaign, frequency of visits, average bill value and basket size, and their contribution to total sales. This test can be conducted across a number of clients, and we have seen an average increase of 5 per

cent in sales from the group exposed to integrated CRM.”

Loyalty Factor Technology has added new channels of customer interaction, and retailers leveraging new systems are finding they can reach even distant customers as a means to grow their business. “It is said that 70 per cent of buying decisions are made even before the first contact with the retailer through social media,” says Kranti Kiran Avadhanula, director of CRM solution management at SAP. “Companies that are able to better manage their brand perception in social media are able to speed up their business growth. Retaining an existing customer is far more economical than gaining new ones; thus, by running loyalty reward programs, companies can defend their customer base and ensure repeat business.” Spring Air uses CRM to build customer loyalty and gain a complete view of its customers, says Ashok Sharma, the regional CEO of the sleep supplies retailer. “CRM helps is to manage budgets, time bounds and target audiences for promotional activities that stimulate purchases. We also use retail CRM to automate routine operations, such as printing cards and letters, and send e-mails, and to create monitoring dashboards to ensure that customer needs are being met. It can define the most valuable customers, forecast sales for different product groups and analyse statistics.”

For Ranjit Satyanath, a senior technology manager at Shoppers Stop: “CRM is an integral part of our business. We run a loyalty program called the First Citizens Club, and three quarters of our top-line revenues come from its 2.5 million members” Shoppers Stop developed the deployment of its bespoke CRM over its ERP system in-house. “This helps us track the buying behaviour of our customers, and also helps us source products based on what the market wants. Likewise, we also run promotions based on what our consumers need, rather than doing generic promotions. As a matter of importance, our CRM product provides us with feedback from customers. “We built a program whereby we give customers three times the loyalty points for purchases made during the Diwali promotion period. This helped customers build a large reservoir of points, and saw phenomenal success last year; we see no reason why we cannot repeat it this year.” In order to manage the relationship with consumers, the company rolled out a mobile app last year that is designed to make promotions available to customers when they need it, rather than when the company wants to communicate it to them.

Harminder Sahni, managing director of Wazir Advisors, says: “Technology for mobile devices is becoming increasingly popular CRM. The mobile phone becomes the loyalty card, meaning that customers don't need to carry another card in their pockets. All transactions are conveyed through the mobile, and the retailer saves a lot of the costs for filling forms, card issuance and replacing old or lost cards. Also the service provider offers storage and management of data, and analytics, again saving a tremendous amount of costs for the retailer. Capillary is the market leader in this space and offers CRM services as Software As A Service. A retailer pays a rental charge on a monthly basis for each store using the service.” Fashion

retail major Globus, with a footprint of 36 stores across the country, uses CRM developed with a partner for fuelling its loyalty program. The cards are available in silver, gold and platinum categories and form a central repository system for the company. “Around 60 per cent of our business comes from our repeat clientele, and therefore loyalty is a big bet for us and we are constantly looking to innovate. In fact we will be making an announcement soon about a new loyalty program that will enhance the customer experience even more. While I can’t disclose much now, we will have features like a customer being able to check their points on a mobile device, and we are also planning to introduce prepaid cards,”

says Meheriar Patel, Globus Stores’s CTO. For Dinesh Kumar, director of Browntree Retail: “Our CRM approach has helped us build the trust of customers in our brand as they are aware that we listen to their queries, and that any problems with regards to service or product will be addressed. CRM has made a significant contribution to our growth over the three years we have been in operation. Providing products on request, solving issues in a given time frame and responding to queries promptly has given us tremendous increase in footfall.” CRM is certainly the technology that is win-win, for retailers and customers alike.