Running Head: WOOLWORTH AUSTRALIAN ORGANIZATION

Integration of CRM (customer relationship management) technologies with digital platforms to

increase sales profit for Woolworth Group Limited
[Name]
[Date]
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Introduction:
Woolworth Group Limited is a major Australian company that directly owns a large-scale chain
of supermarkets in Australia, referred as Woolworths or woolies. The company also owns
discount department stores in Australia under the name of Big W. This organization was found
on September 22, 1924 by five Australian entrepreneurs and is headquartered in Melbourne. By
revenue share recorded as A$63.67 billion in the year 2020, Woolworth Group limited is denoted
as referred as the largest company in Australia. The company is independent of the other units
operating in UK, United States and South Africa. The first operating unit inaugurated in
Australia was named as “Woolworths Stupendous Bargain Basement”. Due to the diversity in its
operations, Woolworths has grown exponentially to the extent of making duopoly with Coles
Supermarkets (Haskins, et al. 2020). This target was achieved by controlling more than 80%
fraction of the entire market in Australia. As supermarkets being the fundamental focus of
business for Woolworths, the company offer expertise in groceries such as meat, vegetables,
packaged foods, and fruits (Van Kampen and Kirkham, 2020). Aside from these products and
services, Woolworths also deal in products associated with household, pet supplies and health
and beauty while also collaborate with magazines. Currently, Woolworths retail group is
operating a network of around 3300 stores whereas these stores are made functional by around
200,000 dedicated employees. On an average rate, Woolworth is responsible for providing
services to approximately 29 million customers per week. According to Australia statistics in
2021, a substantial increase in the overall food sales of Woolworths group was observed, from
A$34.8 billion reaching up to A$42.15 billion between 2016 and 2020 (Statista. 2021. Australia:
total sales of food of Woolworths Group 2021). The following report will be evaluating a
relationship between CRM and digital tools utilized by Woolworths Company to enhance its
productivity and ensure business progress.

Digital tools used by Woolworths:

From a business point of view, digital tools could be referred as certain online resources,
programs, or websites that are used by businesses for various purposes such as marketing,
approach customers, and targeted audience, etc (Horváth and Szerb, 2018). Several digital tools
used by businesses may include mobile apps, official websites and could also be associated with
social media platforms such as Instagram, and Facebook. Considering the number of stores and
business infrastructure of Woolworths, the company has extensive reach to customers. The
ecommerce footprint of Woolworths group is impressive as it enjoyed more than A$1.2bn sales
on the online platform in June 2014, which gave a 50% rise to sales in comparison to the last
year (Rajeck and Rajeck, 2021). To eventually alleviate the interaction with customers especially
those interested in approaching, social media is a powerful digital equipment for Woolworths.
Aside from the customers, social media also provide an exceptional platform for the business
managers and employees to interact with each other. According to a survey, an average staff of
Woolworths tend to spend almost 1.6 hours on computer per day while around 2 hours on mobile
per day to interact (Studypurpose.com. 2021). Around 50% of the mobile works that the
employees are involved, are associated with social media. This highlights that Woolworths’
employees certainly use social media for communication and information sharing.
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Online appearance of Woolworths:

Upon judging the official online website of Woolworths Australia, the bright colors and
sequenced icon arrangement with differential panels, makes it highly attractive for the customers.
After business establishment, Woolworths took an extensive period for joining the social media
bandwagon. Although Woolworths came into existence in the 19’s, the company established a
twitter account as well as a Facebook fan page in 2010. The underlying reason was to target and
reach population belonging to GEN X and GEN Y. However, rather than solely attracting the
new generation customers, Woolworths has also valued social media to deliver relevant
information to customers in the mean-time. Such as alerting the customers regarding weekly
offers or opening of new stores. Currently Woolworths have around 1,189,437 follower on
Facebook. With regular and continues social media updates, Woolworths was declared as the
third best social platform by Ornico which is a media firm. While on the other hand, Africa
brand index regarded Woolworths as one of the best retail brand in the same year, considering its
intimidating online presence. Study by Jensen and Chen, (2021) indicates that Woolworth tend to
attract around 400,000 communications each month. Although Woolworths is not a content or
broadcast channel, the online appreciation that the retail company is receiving is due to their
ability to recognize and acknowledge their content, customers and products.

Customer relationship management:

Social media could reliably increase communication, information sharing, cooperation, and
distribution. Rather than solely relying on social media, the main target of developing businesses
is to use digital technology to create new experiences and values that could allow the companies
to build competitive advantage against their peers. To ensure continuous growth, the company
may use the information from digital platforms to formulate certain developmental strategies
while targeting the particular audience. This approach is concerned with Customer Relationship
Management. According to (Kumar and Reinartz, 2018) CRM (customer relationship
management) is defined as a set of strategies, technologies and practices that are used by
businesses to analyze and manage interactions with the customers throughout customer lifecycle.
While on the other hand, digital tools such as social media provide an independent platform for
customer interaction which could be considered for CRM practices. Therefore, customer
relationship management is highly influenced by the digital technologies used by the business.
CRM could be categorized into several components while the most commonly used by business
is the CRM tool which is in the form of a software. A CRM tool is designed to efficiently gather
customer data from multiple channels regarding various aspects such as personal information of
customers, overall purchase history, and purchasing behavior patterns (Charoensukmongkol, and
Sasatanun, 2017). The CRM used by Woolworth group limited is “salesforce automation” which
is an Automation Technology concerned with sales management (Sinclair, 2020).

Sales force automation technology

Sales force automation also known as SFA, is a software tool that is used by businesses for sales
management. SFA is considered one segment of the Customer relationship management (CRM)
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process that tend to record all the phases associated with sales (Park, et al. 2010). This
technology help the companies in tracking customer interactions, and also allow them to
automate certain business functions associated with sales cycle (Holloway, Deitz, and Hansen,
2013). The functions that are automated are majorly necessary to follow leads. Simultaneously,
tracking customer interactions enables the businesses to acquire new customers and build loyal
customer base. Companies such as Woolworth, use SFA software to turn the workflow into
automated ones rather than manual which eventually establishes streamlined sales process. Due
to the higher effectiveness, streamlines sales processes are then utilized by companies to manage,
alter and modify several other functions such as sales forecast, business leads, and team
performance.

SFA features:
Several features of Salesforce automation technology used by successful teams include,
opportunity management, task management, contact management, diary sharing and email
integration. The contact management SFA software’s allows mean-time communicating with
customers while also providing the sales teams with all the activities, and records associated with
sales (Jain and Jaiswal, 2015). On the other hand task management offers a set of reminders for
the teams to execute their sales leads on a specific given time without missing. Finally, the sale
leads are driven form an initial inquiry phase towards closed sale via pipeline management
(Marinou, et al. 2016). These features allows the sales teams to effectively run smooth sales
processes on online platforms and dealing with huge customer traffic. Integration of SFA,
therefore, highly mitigates the risk of customer irritation due to delayed responds or delayed
orders. Upon an insight analysis of ‘salesforce’ used by the Woolworths in 2019, it was
evaluated that each of the seven business lines operating under Woolworths had developed
independent Salesforce orgs (Crozier, and Crozier, 2021). However, this variation led to the
disadvantage of Woolworths. Such as one of the business lines of Woolworths named as Bunch
was offering free products for customers to be used as samples. As the business line was
powered by salesforce community cloud, tremendous amount of repeated code form the
customers across different salesforce orgs was eventually detected. In response to this scenario,
Woolworth created and funded a center to support a conference among business lines and IT
managers. Such innovation eventually allowed the company draw value from their salesforce
investment.

Recommendation
In terms of scale, scope and diversity of operations, Woolworths has encountered considerable
growth in the recent years. During the recent COVID-19 pandemic situation, the e-commerce
sales were observed to hike manifolds than normal rates, while demonstrating an upward
revision by 77.9%. With a huge customer traffic tolling on the online platforms, implementation
of CRM within the business ensures efficient, consistent and smooth interaction with consumers
with the aim of increasing the overall profits. Since SFA (salesforce automation) is CRM tool
use by Woolworths, it could be integrated with other online platforms such as Instagram, face
eBook and twitter to enable the company to easily manage marketing camping’s collaborate with
the customers and identifying sales opportunities. Technology has always been associated with
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the fact of delivering information to customers. Using SFA to access information regarding
customer behavior patterns for purchasing goods and services, the advertisements must be
tailored according to customers’ interest. Moreover, a new tracking system must be integrated
with online platform to access targeted audience to increase sale profits. Digital contact tracking
system could be indulged within the sales model of Woolworths to improve integration with
targeted customers (Trivedi and Vasisht, 2020). However, encrypted details must be preferred to
ensure security of the customers’ data.

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