Retailers fail to lay IT foundations for CRM
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| "Many retail companies are jumping on the CRM bandwagon without assessing the additional burden on their existing IT infrastructure. These technologies require a robust and scalable environment, especially when it comes to data storage and warehousing" |
Valuable customer data could go to waste if retailers don’t implement an appropriate back end infrastructure to support their CRM applications.
CRM has become of increasing importance in the competitive retail market, and IT analyst Gartner predicts that corporate adoption rates will have hit 98 per cent in the next two years.
Simon Gay, Consultancy Practice Leader at Computacenter, commented: “Many retail companies are jumping on the CRM bandwagon without assessing the additional burden on their existing IT infrastructure. These technologies require a robust and scalable environment, especially when it comes to data storage and warehousing.”
Storage choices
There are a variety of options available, and commonly retailers use a combination of direct attached, SAN and network attached storage in their production environment. Many of these technologies, however, are increasingly becoming ‘virtualised’, as organisations look to optimise their IT assets.
“A virtual storage environment provides greater flexibility and scalability, and is easier to manage,” comments Gay. “It also enables retailers to maximise their storage capacity by creating a logical pool of resources, that can be shared and charged across different business functions according to their usage rates.”
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regulations on the Financial Services sector. Such storage systems not only need to cope with information from a variety of sources and in multiple formats, but also provide swift access.
Under the Data Protection Act, companies need to be able to respond to requests for information within an absolute maximum of 40 days.
James Mullock, Partner with legal firm Osborne Clarke, commented: “To comply with the Act, retailers will need to access all records relating to a customer from store and loyalty card information to complaints and credit history. Retrieving this data from multiple systems can be a lengthy process, and companies therefore need to find an effective way to classify and archive customer information.”
Added value
Resolving such challenges are essential if retailers are to maximise their investment in CRM solutions and simplify the management of customer data.
“Retailers face a constant battle to retain customers. CRM is a valuable weapon in this fight, but can only realise its true potential when deployed in a robust and scalable infrastructure,” added Gay.
