Necessity of Integration of Bigdata Analytics in CRM in Retail Industry
The retail companies are growing day by day which makes them to maintain good relationships with their customers including existing and new as well. There is a huge competition in the market within this money and technology minded industry where only those companies can survive which are able to maintain relationship with their customers. In order to attain success in the handling of customers, there is a need of a software that can keep a check on the sales, marketing, after-sales services and follow-up or feedback of the consumers. This will help companies to save their rime as well as money. Furthermore, a software called CRM is specially designed for such purposes. CRM is not just a software but more that. It helps to maintain heavy data for retail industry with the spent of minimum organizational cost and without wastage of time.
Research Objectives/Aims
Research objectives provides a direction for the successful completion of the research. A successful research is the remark of well-established research objectives. The objectives of this research follows as:
- To scrutinize the essential role of Big data for the operations of retail companies.
- To study the issues that take place due to increase in data needs.
- To assess the importance and need of Big data analytics in CRM in retail industry
Literature Review
Big data analytics as the word describes means to examine large or big data that is necessary to uncover various known or unknown aspects like marketing trends, unknown or hidden patterns and correlations and other important information related to customer’s preferences that can help a business to make better decisions. According to Hellerstein, 2008, in order to manage integration of big data analytics with customer relationship management (CRM) one should keep in mind the difference of CRM for business to business and business to customers. Business to business possess lesser amount to deal with. This make it more predictable but when it is about dealings in retail sector, presence of variety of customers make it more complicated for data handling. Thus, it is necessary to integrate this for the growth of business. Whereas CRM for business to customers is directly linked with the user’s or customer’s end. Primary aim of this research is to analyze the scope as well as need of big data in retail super market. It also focuses to highlight the need of big data for establishing better customer base. This study first focuses on CRM and big data and then how their integration can help a retail business to grow efficiently. There are number of benefits large data sets and huge amount of data which plays great role in underpinning new waves of growth, consumer surplus, innovation etc. Big data produces high value for retailers and their business growth.
Research Methodology
In this research number of surveys as well as semi-structured interviews have been conducted. Thus primary research has been followed for the successful accomplishment of the research work. This helped to collect first hand information and real experiences related to big data analytics. For this purpose, 100 employees were interviewed in the form of survey to reach towards a meaningful conclusion. Furthermore, secondary method was also applied for collection of information. Secondary data implies to the data which has already been used. Thus, this information was collected from various online sources containing the information of UK based retailers like case studies of Tesco and Sainsbury. Written documentaries also played important part for collecting data regarding financials and annual reports of UK based supermarkets. Apart from these, online articles and journals were also analyzed for the purpose of data collection.
Conclusion
Success of proper implementation of big data factors can be evaluated by comparing the quality of system which further can help to know whether the overall system has been improved or not. Furthermore, the consumers may have alternative behavior regarding the CRM which nay not result in the yield of expected results. This may also happen if the needs of the customers are not properly addressed or undertaken by the management. Organizational factors also play essential role in analyzing the successful implementation of CRM integrated with big data. The processes that retail companies follow for the improvement of their business also forms an important factor to know whether the success can be achieved by integration methodology or not. Moreover, the success of a business also depends on the change agent which itself represents the form of organization.
References
- Hellerstein, J. (2008). Parallel Programming in the Age of Big Data. Gigaom Blog.
- Segaran, T. (2009). Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions. O’Reilly Media. p. 257.
- Piskar, F. (2009). A successful CRM Implementation Project in a Service Company: Case Study. Organizacija, Vol: 42, pp. 199-208.
- Myron, D. (2010). DestinationCRM.com. Information Today, Inc. CRM in Customer Service https://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=99909 CRM in Customer Service. Accessed on 15thJuly, 2015.
Davenport, T. (2001). How do they know their customers so well. MIT Sloan Management Review, Vol. 42 No.2, pp.63-73.