Hur betydelsefull är CRM data? : En studie om användandet av CRM-system inom livsmedelskedjorna ICA och Coop

During the last few decades a new kind of business operation have developed and this has forced organisations to adapt themselves to a new competitive environment characterized by increased customer demands as well as a larger amount of competitors. Therefore companies have had a shift in their strategies from focusing on sales numbers to focusing on the customer. To build lasting customer relationships, in order to create customer loyalty, have become an important part of the organisational strategy and the collection of consumer data is essential in achieving this loyalty. Customer relationship management systems assist organisations in managing information about individual customers as well as managing all aspects of customer contact, with the purpose of increasing customer loyalty towards the company. The collection of consumer data also enables for companies to design personalized offers to individual customers in the form of direct marketing. Since Swedish grocery stores have a low degree of loyalty amongst their customers they are one example of businesses who collects information about their consumers in order to influence customer loyalty. To be able to answer our problem definition and the purpose of this essay we used two empirical studies as well as a theoretical base consisting of mainly literature and scientific articles. Both the empirical studies and the theoretical base focused on the three key aspects of this essay; direct marketing, CRM-systems and customer loyalty. We used a qualitative method in the empirical studies since we wanted to get deeper and more detailed information, regarding the subjects in our study, than a quantitative approach would have resulted in. Since this study is based on only two interviewees we found that a qualitative method was optimal for our study, partly to be able to compare and analyse the different responses with each other but also with the collected theories. We chose to focus our empirical study on the two largest grocery stores in Sweden; ICA and Coop because of their size on the Swedish market in order to enable a certain degree of generalization. The two interviewees from the different companies were chosen as a result of their knowledge about the studied subject and also because of the difference in their positions within the companies, which we believe contributed to an increased depth in our analysis, discussion and conclusion. One conclusion that we reached is that the three key aspects; customer loyalty, CRM-systems and direct marketing are all linked together since they both affect and complement each other. Another conclusion that we have developed during this study is that the significance of CRM data in order to create customer loyalty within large Swedish grocery stores is dependent on the degree of sophistication within the computer system in relation to the company’s direct marketing