Customer Relationship Management for the E-Grocery Sector

In this paper, the e-grocery sector of the U.S. is used as an illustrative example of how to assess consumers' demands for customer relationship management and to investigate whether these demands coincide with effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategies suggested by academic researchers and provided by practitioners. Surveys evaluating the perceived importance of CRM items were administered accordingly. The findings show that, overall, consumers' did not differ considerably to the experts. The results of descriptive analyses showed that academicians had a more closely in-lined view with consumers than did practitioners. Although not statistically significant, practitioners perceived loyalty programs to be more important than did consumers or academicians. This might suggest that loyalty programs are primarily serving as a way of data mining, and are thus failing to provide benefits to consumers. Overall, items related to technology deployment were perceived to be more important by practitioners than consumers or academicians.