ICL South Africa, a leader in the field of information technology services and solutions for retailers, has unveiled a new range of 'customer-centric' offerings aimed at assisting retailers to achieve a greater understanding of their customers and, in the end, increase their profitability.
The package, known as Customer Relationship Marketing - or COREMA - is a complete loyalty management programme that not only gathers information on what the customer is buying, but where the customer is buying, when the customer is buying, and how the customer is paying. The latter is of particular interest to loyalty card programmes.
ICL SA retail specialist, Mike Watkins, says COREMA enables the retailer's marketing team to develop highly sophisticated and focused plans - or customer-centric plans - aimed at meeting the very particular needs of people in the information society.
Watkins cites the case of Camelot Music in the USA to convey how the COREMA solution can work to the benefit of a company. Camelot was in a financially bad way when, in desperation, it turned to COREMA to collect data on its customers.
It soon found that a disproportionately high number of customers over the age of 65 were buying 'rap' and 'techno' music and, in probing this further, they discovered that these people were buying music CDs as gifts for their grandchildren.
"Camelot was then able to create a list of recommended music for this group, giving guidelines as to what music appealed to which age groups. The recommended list of music was an instant hit and sales doubled in no time, " says Watkins.
Camelot now uses the COREMA fully integrated retail and marketing solutions to analyse sales patterns and trends and to develop more accurately focused marketing, resulting in a sustained increase in turnover.
Another ICL retail solution aimed at improving profitability in an increasingly demanding and competitive marketplace is the ICL Loss Prevention Management System (LPMS), which analyses all transactions at the point of sale and reports on those most likely to be fraudulent. This has resulted in significant savings, as research has shown that in excess of 50% of all shrinkage in store occurs at the checkout.
Once LPMS has identified potentially fraudulent transactions, the system provides the company's loss prevention specialist with the necessary information to discover fraud in a much shorter time-frame. It also enables the company to produce incontrovertible evidence of the fraudulent activity, which is especially important given the current labour legislation.
"LPMS is the only application of its type, developed specifically for retailers. We are confident that it can be used to reduce shrinkage by a significant amount, and can already point to cases where our LPMS system has contributed to a reduction in shrinkage from three percent of sales to just two percent," adds Watkins.
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