CRM in Organised Retailing: Exploring the Customer Relationship Building Factors

With the entry of multiple corporate groups in the Indian retail sector over years, the retailing business has become fiercely competitive and dynamic. It has thrown a serious challenges to the managers of organized retail sector to retain their existing customers and develop loyalty. The big organised retailers were able to attract thousands of shoppers everyday but unable to identify their regular customers and retain them, especially profitable ones. To meet these challenges, most of the organised retailers implemented Customer Relationship Management (CRM) under which they adopted multiple customer relationship building practices focusing aggressively on creating and strengthening long-term relationships with their customers. This study made an attempt to explore the factors behind the relationship building between the retailers and their customers and is based on the responses of 372 customers of nine leading Indian multi-brand organised retailers in Delhi/NCR. SPSS 20 software was used for data analysis. The study discovered six relationship building factors among which Customer service emerged as the most dominant factor followed by Customer centricity, Loyalty rewards, Personalisation, Customer communication and Community building.