Supervalu

Gary Eppinger, Former IT Executive, Supervalu

Social Media’s relevance in the Retail Industry

I would say my perspective for media is relevant especially for a company which has a close relationship with customers. When you have a full connection with the customers. It’s gives you an opportunity to provide services for them in real time. So you don’t have to call to complain manager, you can pose complaint, we can see them and respond to it immediately when there is an issue or even more importantly when we have a chance to have real time training opportunity. We provided the application to our customers to make their shopping experience better. We think about what marketing used to be, it was very generic. We used to send out the marketing merchandise to everybody in a certain zip code. Social media gives us an opportunity to give specialized specific marketing and discussion that’s very different for you and it would be for me based on my current needs.

Social Media at Supervalu an asset and not a Potential Threat

From my perspective, a social media strategy is all based on our marketing strategies which is aligned with the IT organization to ensure that we can deliver what are customers need. So we try understanding customers better and ensure that we are building the platform that will make it different.

Maximizing cost efficiency for IT

Delivering high security services is one of my passions. It helps to think of delivering security from the service perspective. Having a great security platform allows you to protect information and customer data and privacy of their conversation allows you to have a higher sincerity to the customer. Looking at security project in the same manner as looking at business applications, they need to be justified the same, including hard and soft benefits, cost saving, productivity and operational upgrades