Industry: Buying Groups View from the industry


Customer relationship management is INTERSPORT UK general manager Tom Foley’s talking point this month.


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onsumers expect a lot from their retail shopping experience when they are in an actual bricks and mortar store or buying online. With companies large and small getting better and cleverer with communication to the consumer the role of customer relationship management (CRM) is playing an increasingly important role.


Large companies are driving ever-more technically efficient ways of knowing their customers and communicating with them on an individual level, for instance the large supermarkets with loyalty schemes and enormous data bases. Although this may seem like an unobtainable goal to independent retailers in fact in many ways the smaller company is at an advantage. They actually know there customers personally and with a small effort can put that knowledge to good work to develop the relationship and the loyalty that customer has.


Loyalty schemes are often seen as CRM in themselves where in fact they only form part of a good CRM programme. Loyalty schemes need to be smart and integrated into the full marketing programme, to deliver real relevance and perceived benefit to customers. Customer behaviour can be influenced positively, and ultimately deliver a far greater profit to the bottom line as well as enhanced brand and customer equity. It’s no secret that the new generation of consumers has become increasingly sophisticated and


demanding in its expectations. However CRM should be at the heart of everything a retailer does. From the moment that a customer enters the store or website the experience they have forms part of that relationship. That first impression the customer has from the fresh and interesting window displays to a clean


and tidy shop floor sets a scene and a level of expectation. Followed with good product ranges and perhaps most critically great customer service. Particularly in sports retailing technical product and category knowledge is so important to being able to give the customer that personal service and advice that can set you apart from the competition. Independent sports retailers often have the advantage of having a real passion for sports that is intrinsically part of that store’s DNA and therefore the staff as well. The opportunity comes in taking that passion into a plan which touches every area of the store and how that is conveyed to the customers at every level.


Tom Foley, Intersport UK general manager


Tech Tips: ‘It’s so powerful’ Top to Toe director Michael Bloom continues to investigate technology and what makes a good stock management system.


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y first article discussed the much claimed ‘easy to use’. As a minimum, a sports retailer needs a system in which it is easy to enter many size/colour combinations for a single product within a matter of seconds, and to then, in one action, to be able to quickly find and assess that complete product with all its SKU combinations.


What then of the ‘it’s so powerful’ claim? Being able to put different sizes/colours into a system speedily and to be able to find all the sizes and colours in one action is not enough. There is the time factor; what does ‘quickly find and assess that complete product’ mean? Imagine if the underlying system was designed to deal with products where there was just one number for each product’s overall stock quantity; where the system was not really designed to handle products which have 20-60 variations of size and colour. In this situation it could take five seconds to five minutes for all the information you need to


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appear on your screen. Faster computer hardware will of course speed this up, but if the software was not designed for the job of handling size/colour then as you add more and more data it will go slower and slower. But does this matter? Yes, very much is the answer.


When you have a lot to do you need to move through things quickly. You do not want to spend more time waiting than actually working. Just to get an idea of how frustrating a five second delay can be try reading from the next semi colon with a five second wait between each word; it will drive you mad with frustration. A two second job takes over 30 seconds. It’s definitely not how you want to spend the next few years of you retail management life.


Imagine this effect multiplied by the minutes, hours, days and months you will be using a system. If on a well designed system you could do all you need in an hour or two a day, on the ‘not designed for sportswear’ system you could work for eight hours every day of the week and still


have work to do when you go home. Being realistic, you will simply start cutting more and more corners, get through less work, get less analysis and make less money.


And the problem does not get any better when you consider that you also need to keep all your sales data by size/colour, plus all your order information. In addition there is the issue of sizes and colours at your branches, which adds still more data.


It is vital that you test the system with a typical data load. For a sports retailer this is, say 1,500 to 5,000 products with stock, sales and orders by size/colour. See if it’s as fast as the initial demo and if the lag time is below one second or above 3 seconds. But although this is a good beginning it is not enough.


Power and ease really come together when you look at the issue of how the information is presented – so our next article looks at the question of clarity and we will examine the ‘it’s really clear’ claim.


www.sgb-sports.com


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