Most retailers lack a single view of their customers
across all their sales channels, according to a survey of 40 large
UK high-street chains.
The research, conducted by Martec International on behalf of
retail IT consultancy Charteris, found that 92% of retailers did
not have a single view of their customers across all their sales
channels.
Martin Chitty, head of retail at Charteris, said, "Although
multi-channel retailing is becoming big business, for the average
retailer the levels of sophistication and integration are not as
high as we are often led to believe.
"Most retailers appear to be operating separate processes for
stores and other sales channels."
Some 28% of retailers confirmed that they had more than one view
of customers' data, and 8% said they had separate customer views by
sales channel.
Retailers' customer relationship management systems were seen as
preventing them from creating a single customer view across
different channels.
IT managers at the companies surveyed said they were less
satisfied with their CRM systems than they were with their supply
chain and buying systems.
Argos was believed by those surveyed to have implemented its
multi-channel sales strategy better than any other retailer. Twenty
per cent said they admired Argos, compared with 18% who named
Tesco.
Read article: Shopping for holistic systems
Harrods fine-tunes customer focus
Harrods will this month gain a single view of its customers for
the first time. The department store is using Sun Java Integration
Suite to integrate with a new SAP enterprise resource planning
system.
Harrods' IT department recently completed the migration of the
retailer's legacy applications to the SAP system.
Harrods' IT director David Llamas said the single customer view
would cause the total cost of ownership of its IT systems to
fall.