A River Runs Through It:

How retailers are deploying the future of customer-centric technology—today

From Colloquy, August 14, 2009

by Rick Ferguson and Lynn Russo Whylly

Whatever its merit in terms of efficiency and cost-savings, the true value of retail technology lies in its ability to enhance customer relationships by matching shoppers with relevant products and offers, improving the in-store experience, and delivering vital behavioral data back to the retailer. When evaluating technology, customer-centric retailers insist on a partnership between marketing and IT to look for device deployments that aid in customer identification, value delivery and relevance.

And while incremental sales are nice, one of the unheralded, but perhaps most significant points of differentiation for in-store technology lies in its ability to replicate the river of "clickstream" data available to e-commerce retailers. Amazon.com, for example, can see not only what you bought during your visit, but also what products and offers you looked at or put in your shopping cart, but didn’t buy. By using retail technology to collect and analyze in-store behavior, retailers big and small can replicate that river of shopper data and gain insight that their competitors can’t hope to match. For a look at the future of enterprise loyalty, you’ll need to start at the water’s edge of the in-store experience—where customers, retailers and technology converge.

Hands-on loyalty
Loyalty marketers often speak of the importance of customer choice. Where retail technology is concerned, some retailers have literally put the loyalty device into the hands of their best customers. Case in point: Quincy, Massachusetts-based supermarket company Stop & Shop/Landover, a $17 billion retailer that operates more than 375 locations in seven states. In January 2008, Stop & Shop made retail headlines by adding to their technology arsenal handheld shopping scanners that help the grocer collect and leverage customer data while bettering the customer experience. 18 months later, has the handheld barcode scanning system helped Stop & Shop reach loyalty-marketing nirvana?

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