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Consulting National Chains
Dustin Riedemann
Kaplan University
IT402: IT Consulting Skills
Prof: Abdellah Tazi
August 21, 2013

There are many different ways to look at whether or not the national chain should change their IT applications to help support the customer loyalty program. First the consultant needs to look at all the pros and cons of both changing the applications and the pros and cons of not changing the applications. First we can look at the pros of changing the IT applications to include a customer loyalty program. A good thing that may come out of changing the IT applications would be that the national chain would hope to keep the customers that the regional chain already has. This would help them to make more money and hopefully make the merger a success. This could also attract new customers that are looking to save money when shopping for their regular groceries. By promoting the customer loyalty program and telling potential customers that if they sign up for the program that they will be saving “x” amount on certain marked products, this will more than likely start to bring in more customers to the national chain because most people are always looking for a way to save money. This will also make the national chain more money because they will have more customers coming in and out of their doors, but they will still be making money off the products that they are selling, but they may not be making as much. A con to changing the IT applications to have a customer loyalty program is that it will cost the national chain a lot of money up front. This might mean that they have to cut funds from some other part of their budget and could throw off their daily order of operations. This could also mean that they need to make personnel cuts and they would probably start with the store that they are merging with. They will want to fill this store

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