A footwear retailer is running two businesses at once
At the counter, the sale is fast. A customer wants an article, tries a size, pays and leaves, and there is very little for a CRM to do. Away from the counter there is a second business that behaves nothing like retail: schools ordering uniform shoes by size run, factories replacing safety footwear on a rotation, hospitals, security agencies, hotels and corporates. Those orders take weeks, involve an approver, and are decided on a deadline.
Most footwear retailers manage the first business well and the second one on WhatsApp. The single biggest return from a CRM here is giving the institutional side a proper pipeline, and giving the counter one small habit: recording the size you could not supply.