Thank goodness AT&T was down all during NRF 2010. It allowed me to focus on walking the floor without the distraction of various business associates trying to get in touch with me.
While I can’t say I didn’t miss something, I was able to cover the entire floor. Here are the top 10 things I found of interest as it relates to technology which impacts the customer experience.
Very few of these will have a massive impact in the short run. Some may not even be at NRF next year. However, I believe they point towards the future of retail technology. I will follow up with a blog post on each outlining what I believe to be their benefits as well as challenges they will have in achieving mainstream retail adoption.
Joe Skorupa, Editor-in-Chief, RIS News recently wrote a blog post entitled “Fearless Retail Predictions: Part 2.” He interviewed a strong panel of industry analysts, technology vendors and one retailer to come up with a list of predictions for 2010. The predictions were heavily slanted toward the use of mobile and social media technologies.
“In this year’s study, we also asked how retailers use technology to enhance the customer experience. Should technology be used front and center as part of the experience or behind the scenes? Nearly half of the respondents (48%) answered: “We use technology to enable speed and execution, but it is largely invisible to consumers other than speed through checkout.” In other words, the customer experience in the store is not tied to technology.”
I’m confused because I believe that the power of mobile and social media technologies lies in just that – enhancing the customer experience. This survey is directed heavily at IT personnel (63% of respondents). Perhaps retail IT executives don’t see mobile and social media technologies as enhancing the customer experience. Perhaps they are just not involved with how these technologies are being leveraged.
Based on my experience with retail executives, these tools are being investigated mainly by the marketing department led by ad agencies looking for ways to capitalize on the changing media landscape. Agencies are proposing mobile applications, couponing services, location-based services, social media campaigns and other creative ways of tapping into the social and mobile scene; all without much IT involvement.
CIO’s need to get their arms around these marketing efforts – not to control them, but to help the organization understand how to more fully leverage these technologies; integrating mobile into multi-channel and loyalty efforts, integrating social media into business intelligence efforts. If left to outside forces, opportunities to leverage these technologies to differentiate the customer experience may be diminished or lost. When these tools are integrated into the retailers’ infrastructure, they will truly become technology which enables a differentiated customer experience.
This is part two of a blog post regarding Mary Meeker’s 2009 Web 2.0 presentation and implications for retailers. For me, there are six key takeaways:
1. Your customers will increasingly carry massive computing power and, via the cloud, access to any information and services they want. You need to make them value yours vs. some third party price comparison site. Build and deploy valuable applications that support the customer through the buying cycle from search, to store, to purchase.
2. Customers will expect Wi-Fi service at every retail location. I know there are issues. Provide it anyway.
3. Location, location, location. Not yours; your customers. Knowing the customers location will enable entirely new ways of communicating and fostering a relationship with them. Be careful. You need to offer value for this information. If you use this information to spam them, the opportunity for conversation will be lost for a very long time.
4. Ready or not, devices like the iPhone are coming to the retail enterprise. People are using them in their daily lives and will see the value of using them at work. Security and other concerns need to be addressed, but departments and business units will push retail CIO’s to incorporate these tools sooner rather than later.
5. The information kiosk is dead. The customer is carrying the next generation kiosk with them. Make this part of your mobile commerce strategy.
6. As in Japan, mobile commerce will represent the fastest growing channel for multi-channel retailers. I know; we’ve been talking about mobile commerce for a decade. The iPhone changed everything. If you don’t have a mobile commerce strategy. You need to develop one – now.
Last month, I wrote a post summarizing Mary Meeker’s recent presentation at Web 2.0. I was recently thinking more about the implications to retailers. As a recap, below are some key facts and comments by Meeker.
From the wireless arena:
GPS – 421MM GPS Chips were sold in 2008(e) representing 57% annual growth. Cell phones and PDAs were 60% of shipments.
3G – 490MM global users. Grew at a 45% annual rate in Q2 09. 3G users are 12% of the mobile user population forecasted to grow to 44% by 2013.
Wi-Fi – 319MM chipsets were sold in 2008E.
AT&T’s mobile data traffic is up 50X in the past three years – a 4,932% increase!
Wi-Fi is still growing considerably. There are currently 35MM hotspots. Interestingly, 42% of iPhone usage happens on Wi-Fi networks.
Mary predicts 3G usage will hit an inflection point in 2010 (>20% usage).
Mary believes that location-based services are key to the mobile internet ’secret sauce’.
Facebook and Apple are driving independent but overlapping innovations in social networking and mobile platforms:
Facebook has 390MM users representing 153% annual growth. There are 350,000 apps, and 500MM downloads. People are spending 6B minutes on Facebook each day! YouTube and Twitter are also significant and growing.
Apple iPhone/iPod Touch has 57MM users, representing 166% annual growth, 100K apps and 2B downloads.
Apple unshackled mobile developers from Carrier “walled gardens”. The iPhone/iTouch represent the fastest hardware user growth in consumer technology history.
Japan is leading the way in the mobile space. If you look at the 2008 world-wide mobile internet revenue mix, it resembles Japan in 2000. If you look at Japan today as a proxy for where the rest of the world is headed, you see slight growth in mobile advertising revenue, but greater market share growth in mobile paid services (travel booking, mobile banking) and mobile online commerce (retail sales of physical goods and digital goods such as ringtones, wallpaper) and a lower percentage of revenue coming from mobile data access. In Japan, mobile is currently running around 18% of total eCommerce revenue.
So, what does this mean for retailers? Stay tuned for the next post on Wednesday…
I have found that very often retailers can lag other industries in terms of adoption of more operational technologies, but in terms of customer-facing technologies, which are increasingly powerful and prevalent, they will need to be leaders to differentiate and survive.
“[Augmented reality is] closer than you think. And, just as online changed consumers’ expectations from retailers, new user interfaces will easily have the same impact, forcefully thrusting retailers once again to the forefront of consumer technology adoption. Whether they’re ready or not.”
This is clearly going on via the web and even the Sunday paper with companies like Best Buy and Wal-Mart. Increasingly, this technology will be used to differentiate the in-store experience in new, exciting, and innovative ways.
I was reading a blog post by John Sviokla on the Harvard Business website asking, “How Will Augmented Reality Affect Your Business?” Since I’d been spending some time thinking about the specific applications to retail, I thought I’d take a shot at answering that question for the retail space.
In this post, I will show some general examples, some retail specific ones, and then talk about what I think this means for retail.
For those of you who are not familiar with the concept, the basic idea behind augmented reality is to visually merge virtual objects with real objects. The most common example is the first-down marker you see on televised football games. To get the juices flowing, below are some examples which have fueled my imagination with regards to the topic.
Most of the above scenarios are enabled by a ‘tag’ – a visual symbol that starts the visualization. Here is a different example from a company called Layar which instead uses GPS and compass orientation to display virtual information over the live video feed from your camera.
I think the mobile aspect, adding the context of not only location but also the specific customer using the application, is significant. Using an AR shelf tag, one application might be to display different promotional offers to different customers based on their loyalty status or even time of day.
Thanks to Keith McGreggor, I had the good fortune recently to meet with Blair McIntyre, who heads up the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech. Brilliant guy. I appreciate his taking time to meet with me. While he pointed out that there are still limitations (camera quality, iPhone API issues), I’m convinced that we are at the front of a convergence between the mobile web and the real world.
The retail business against the current economic backdrop is about value, differentiation and growth by seizing market share. Augmented reality technology has the potential to transform the customer experience in fundamental ways that separate the winners from the losers. I also believe that while AR will be used first in marketing and customer facing applications, there are significant operational applications as well.
We are just starting up the hype curve now and it will be several years before we see the trough of despair and mainstream adoption, but depending in the overall value proposition of the retailer, AR technologies have the potential to change the game.
Thank goodness AT&T was down all during NRF 2010. It allowed me to focus on walking the floor without the distraction of various business associates trying to get in touch with me. 
Joe Skorupa, Editor-in-Chief, RIS News recently wrote a blog post entitled “
This is part two of a 
Last month, I wrote a 
LinkedIn
facebook
twitter