Competitive Environment And Maintaining Customer Relationships

Morrison’s is a food retailer which was established in 1899. Morrison’s started off as a stall at a local market in Bradford run by William Morrison and has since grown to be the UK’s fourth largest food retailer. Morrison’s aims to, “attract, motivate and develop people to ensure that Morrison’s becomes the ‘food specialist for everyone’”. In addition to Morrison’s being a supermarket it also offers a range of other services; cafés, recycling, dry cleaning, photo printer, petrol station and pharmacy. Morrison’s is highly customer orientated as they try to provide the best service to their customers by providing them with high quality and reasonably priced items.

Tesco is a British multinational grocery and general merchandise retailer, it has stores in 14 countries across Asia, Europe and North America and is the grocery market leader in UK, where it has a market share of around 30%.

However, this is not the case for many other businesses as they see recession as actually creating an opportunity for making long-term profits. The recession has helped businesses to come out stronger than ever. Waitrose had seen sales fall as customers chose to buy from rivals such as Asda/Tesco. In response to that Waitrose launched its 'essential Waitrose' range in an attempt to win over customers that have abandoned the chain in favour of cheaper outlets such as Asda or even Lidl and Aldi. Waitrose has woken up to the recession and they realized that they need to make their value message clearer. The performance of Waitrose,

British people take a positive attitude towards the new products and new tastes. Waitrose has a wide range of articles, selling a lot of products typical and produced in other countries. http://www.waitrose.com/home/inspiration/About_our_product_ranges.html accessed 20/03/2011

John Lewis Partnership owns the leading retail business of Waitrose and John Lewis, as well as John Lewis Broadband (provided by Plusnet plc) and John Lewis Insurance services (John , 2016). .

"John Lewis has definitely replaced M&S as the darling of the British high street, M&S is still the more predominant – it has more stores and more shoppers – but when you look at new routes to market like online and mobile John Lewis is light years ahead." said retail analyst Neil Saunders of Conlumino, 2015

Waitrose founded in 1904 by Wallace Waite, Arthur Rose and David Taylor. Today its one of the UK's leading food retailers and part of the John Lewis partnership established in 1929. A company held in trust for the benefit of its employees and one of the top ten UK retail businesses, has over 185 Waitrose Supermarkets and 27 John Lewis Department

(http://www.thegrocer.co.uk) In recent years Tesco have moved away from being a primarily food retailer and have now started

Waitrose was setup at Acton in 1904; it was founded by Wallace Waite, Arthur Rose & David Taylor. In the year 1906 Taylor left the firm, the first shop named “Waitrose” was formed. The company was later acquired by John Lewis Partnership in the year 1937. At that time it had 10 small service food shops and had a turnover of 150000 GBP. After the acquisition, Waitrose now are specialist Supermarkets, having more than 175 supermarkets all over UK mainly in the south-eastern region. It now boasts a work-force of over 37000 employees and many new stores. They offer fresh produce, poultry, bread & meat. Waitrose is a company known for providing high and good quality

Through sustaining the customer relationships, leaders of the company have realized that “becoming nearer to the consumer” is vital for the progression.

Tesco is the leading food retailer in Britain, they have also focused on building non-food sales which are available in store and online. Tesco is one of the world’s largest retailers with approximately 4,331 stores in 14 countries which include Asia, Europe and the United States. (Tesco, 2011). See appendix 1 for a map of the countries Tesco operate in.

Tesco is one of Britain’s leading food retailers and has 586 stores. From 1992, Tesco has grown greatly and has increased its market share from 10.4% to 15.2%. This increase in customers has also given Tesco a large amount of profit.

Product offerings by these contenders are similar as Tesco’s to a huge degree. This procedure helps Tesco to ensure its commercial center by expanding competition. A large portion of the contenders of the Tesco have an equivalent or a bigger market share in the store business. By industry investigators, Tesco PLC has a twenty nine per cent of shares the grocery store industry.

An effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program can be used to identify, retain, satisfy and obtain customers by using technology to optimize strategies for understanding customers’ needs to manage business interactions with current, former, and prospective customers. Additionally, CRM also enables companies to maximize internal, external, marketing and customer service operations to better address the needs of the customer building a better relationship with customers that a more profitable. (Ahmad & Buttle, 2001)

Today, customer relationship management is very important to the business world. Most of the companies established a department and the programs to manage their relationship with the customers. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a business strategy which designed to help a company to understand and look forward to the needs of its potential and current customers (Anderson & Stang, 2000). Customer data is being collected in several different areas of the company, stored in a central database, analyzed, and distributed to key points (Anderson & Stang, 2000).The business world once was “product-centric”, the companies just provided what they could produce. However, it is now become “customer-centric”, they provide products and service