Customer Relationship Management for Retail 

Purpose

There is a broad range of analysis tools at your disposal in SAP BW for controlling and evaluating customer relationships in retail. By combining several of these tools and using them selectively on your customer data, you can define complex analysis processes, helping you significantly increase your understanding of your customer relationships.

The following describes specific analysis processes for the retail industry and suggests how you can use them. The analyses described here are, however, by no means exhaustive. The purpose of these suggestions is much more to show you, using examples, how you yourself can build up complex analyses by linking different methods.

Which analysis processes you can carry out depends on the level of detail of your sales data in SAP BW. It makes a big difference, depending on whether you can access the sales of each product (or product group or product level) for each customer, or whether you only have aggregated sales data without reference to the product. In the first case it is a customer-only information system and in the second case it is a customer/product information system. Unlike for a customer-only information system, you often have to deal with totally different quantities of data to structure a customer/product information system in SAP BW. This depends on the typical sales processes for your company and on the period of time (for example, month or quarter) for which you are carrying out the aggregation in the customer information system. The difference in the quantity can be explained by the following factor: average number of sales per customer and time period multiplied by the average number of articles per transaction. With regard to the interpretation of your SAP BW system, it will therefore often be a fundamental decision whether you build a customer-only information system or a customer/product information system. Therefore, in the following a distinction is made between

·         Analyses in a Customer-Only Information System

·         Analyses in a Customer/product Information System

Whether a customer/product information system or a customer-only information system is of most use to you will depend on which analysis results you require to control your business processes. Therefore, the decision between a customer-only information system and a customer/product information system is closely linked with questions as to which additional analyses of the detailed data are possible and how significant these analyses are for controlling your business processes.

When forming their customer relationship, retail companies are increasingly asking their customers whether they may use the data collected via the necessary business processes (invoicing, activity confirmations, providing discounts) for further evaluations. Firstly, this means the companies are complying with data protection requirements. Secondly, it means that you will be accommodating the needs of your customers, who are increasingly avoiding contact with companies that do not disclose any information about what they do with their customer data. This means that not all customer data is available for analysis or that the data can only be processed anonymously. However, even under these restrictions you can still carry out interesting analyses:

·        Analyses for Anonymous Sales Processes

Prerequisites

You have customer-related sales information in SAP BW.