Key Retail CRM Capabilities to Maximize Store Performance

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a critical business process in both online and brick-and-mortar retail. Its efficiency directly affects customer satisfaction and loyalty and thus largely determines a retailer's revenues.

As a retail business grows, the number of clients also increases, making CRM more labor-intensive and challenging. Retailers can address this challenge by adopting the right digital tools, such as a CRM system.

A robust CRM solution allows a retailer to consolidate all customer data under one roof to streamline customer service, marketing, sales, and other aspects of customer relationship management. In this article, I cover the essential capabilities of CRM systems for retail companies.

Customer Data Management

Retail companies collect vast amounts of customer data through multiple online and offline channels. For instance, employees at brick-and-mortar stores can ask customers to fill out application forms before handling loyalty cards to collect the customer's name, email address, date of birth, and other information and input it into the point-of-sale (POS) system.

If a customer is already using a loyalty card, marketing and sales teams can use corporate loyalty management software to collect data about customer preferences and/or shopping habits. Online retailers can gather customer contact information and other personal data such as gender or age via registration forms on their e-commerce websites, collect transactional information from online POS, and obtain customer geolocation data via mobile apps or social media.

These and other types of customer data collected and processed by the retailer can be used by its employees for various purposes, including service personalization, customer inquiry resolution, and marketing campaign development. However, the efficient use of customer data is only possible if it's accurate and accessible.

The retailer can ensure that data meets these characteristics by implementing a retail CRM system and integrating it with other corporate software. This way, a CRM system acts as a centralized repository that consolidates customer data stored across disparate systems and organizes it into unified data records. This centralization simplifies data access for employees who would otherwise need to switch between multiple systems to obtain this or that information piece.

A robust retail CRM system can also help retailers improve data accuracy by providing built-in data cleansing capabilities. For example, data deduplication tools can be used to eliminate duplicate records, which can confuse employees and negatively affect their operational decisions.

Additionally, CRM software with built-in data cleansing functionality can be used to detect missing values in data records. If the solution is augmented with machine learning algorithms, it can also predict and autofill missing values based on historical data analysis, preventing the misleading of marketing and sales teams.

Marketing and Sales Automation

Attracting prospects and converting them into paying customers is critical for any company, and retailers are no exception. However, if a business is growing and scaling quickly, managing the marketing and sales processes can become increasingly difficult.

Fortunately, companies can streamline many aspects of marketing and sales by implementing retail CRM with automation capabilities. Such CRM can be used to automatically group customers based on certain characteristics, such as age, geolocation or average cart value, thus facilitating the segmentation process for marketers.

In addition, employees can use retail CRM to launch personalized marketing campaigns for each of these segments. For example, they can set up a CRM system to automatically send emails to shoppers who have added several items to their cart but haven't completed their purchase.

This abandoned cart email serves as a reminder for shoppers. It can include a list of items left in the cart, a discount coupon, and a message stating that the cart will soon be empty, implying that the items might go out of stock. This way, employees can encourage customers to return and complete their purchases without wasting time on this mundane and repetitive task.

Sales professionals can also automate multiple aspects of their work by using retail CRM. For example, CRM can be configured to automatically change a customer status within the sales funnel after a specific event, such as opening an email or filling out a form on a website.

With this feature, sales reps can always be aware of each client's position in the sales funnel. They can also identify people who are most likely to make a purchase and focus sales efforts on them, thereby increasing the probability of lead-to-customer conversion.

In-Store Experience Management

The variety of data aggregated by CRM can also be used by employees to improve customer experience in a brick-and-mortar store. After all, quality customer experience helps retailers turn even casual store visitors and one-time shoppers into loyal customers.

In practice, merchandisers can modify the layout of goods in a physical store based on the data about customers’ purchasing preferences consolidated by CRM from different sources such as POS or loyalty management software, and the projected demand. For instance, the most popular items can be placed in a more visible place, such as shelves closer to the store entrance, to make it easier for customers to find their desired products.

More intelligent and data-driven product layouts can not only improve customer satisfaction but also encourage impulse purchases, which can result in increased store sales. Alternatively, merchandisers can make less popular but more expensive products more visible to increase the store visitor's average check.

Customer Service

Implementing a CRM system can improve the performance of a retailer's customer support department in many ways. In particular, consolidating and centralizing customer data via CRM enables support teams to see comprehensive customer profiles and check all related data quickly, which helps them personalize service and resolve customer inquiries more efficiently.

In addition, like sales and marketing reps, support team members can use various CRM workflow automation functionalities. For example, they can use automated email templates to quickly answer customer queries and requests, allowing support specialists to serve more customers simultaneously.

In addition, stores’ support departments can use CRM task management functionality to work more productively. For example, an automated task assignment tool can be used to automatically assign a task that involves calling or sending emails to customers to a specific support team member, thus helping the retailer ensure that no customer inquiry remains unanswered.

Final Thoughts

Regardless of what a retailer sells in its store and whether it operates online or offline, it should manage customer relationships efficiently to ensure customers' loyalty and satisfaction. Retail CRM software can help a retailer cope with this duty by consolidating disparate customer data and providing centralized access to it for authorized employees.

Additionally, retail CRM can provide capabilities for optimizing specific aspects of customer relationship management. Besides providing customer data management functionality, CRM can automate sales, marketing, and customer service, as well as offer features for in-store experience management.

However, to leverage these and other retail CRM capabilities and improve store performance, a retailer must first successfully adopt a CRM system. Third-party retail CRM experts can assist a store owner in executing all aspects of this task, including CRM system requirements definition, development, implementation and integration.

Roman Davydov is an e-commerce technology observer at Itransition, a global software engineering company.