Convenience retailers these days should feel like kids in a candy store—or in their own candy aisles, at least—with regard to technology and their abilities to better understand their customers and businesses.
I’m not talking about anything easily done or plug-and-play. No one’s off the hook in terms of understanding what has to be done and what needs to be in place.
The excitement comes just beyond that learning curve. I’m talking about the vast amount of granular, customer- and transaction-level insights that are now within reach of every retailer—not just the big c-stores or even the Wal-Marts and Krogers of the world. I call it the “democratization” of technology, meaning the sheer cost of what you need—the devices, the resources, the expertise—are now all, or will soon be, affordable and mind-blowingly accessible.
Details in the Digital
Let me give you a taste. If you visited Conexxus in the Tech Pavilion at this year’s NACS Show in Atlanta, you may have seen the advanced uses of gondola technologies.
Imagine a customer going up to a gondola and touching a product. That motion would trigger smart-shelf and other detection and identification devices to suddenly flash information on TV screens above that customer’s head.
At Conexxus, we’re imagining menu labeling going on those screens. Where regulations force the industry to figure out how to show calorie counts to customers, what better way to avoid cumbersome and awkward labels than to digitally show that detail?
Go beyond that and think about loyalty. The sensing devices I’m talking about can now trigger a message telling customers about their rewards points or maybe even doing an upsell.
Think about heat mapping to better understand foot traffic or facial-recognition software that can determine age, sex and other demographics to help determine customer behavior.
The best news is about cost. I’ve been to the Microsoft Experience exhibit in Redmond,
Wash. The company is not saying you need a $2 billion database. It’s showing you how you can do it for mere dollars.
So going back to that customer-interaction idea: The current state of most retailers’ technology is a loyalty program or a coffee punch card. That’s how retailers engage the consumer. We know Bluetooth and mobile-commerce technology can take that to the next level. But at the NACS Show, we put together a panel discussing applications and use cases that could make even those strategies obsolete.
Retailers have to think bigger. Imagine a series of more ubiquitous, cheap sensors that the consumer doesn’t even interact with. Today, we’re mobile-phone-centric.
Retailers think that’s the only way to get to the customer. In the world of tomorrow, the “Internet of Things” will be able to give us a flavor of what the consumer wants without any of the technologies we think we need.
Predictable Perks
Let’s back up a minute. The magic is predicting what consumers really want, right? You can conduct all the surveys in the world, but what you really want to do is understand what people actually do, not just what they say.
Take millennials: They’re notoriously contradictory. They want to live in a nice house but don’t want to pay taxes. You want to connect with them because in a couple of years, they’re going to be more influential than baby boomers. So you have to look at their shopping histories, their mission profiles and their demographics and get predictive.
Millennials want that delight of thinking, “Wow, you knew exactly what I wanted.” So now you marry up what you can gather at the store using cheap sensors and cloud-based analytics—which you can turn on and off at will, by the way—and you add online-data brokers. One such option I’ll call out, Axiom, says it has 1,500 attributes for 10% of the world’s population. Again, marry that to brick-and-mortar data and you have complete digital descriptions of your customers.
Just a few years ago, the technology to do this for a small to midsized retailer would have been unattainable. Now that it’s accessible, it has the ability to revolutionize convenience retail. Slash out-of-stocks or sell that high-traffic spot in your store to the highest-bidding vendor; know what people are truly buying and create the optimal store.
Now, I’m no kid. But what’s going on today should revitalize anyone, because it’s all about coming back at this same little box with a fresh set of eyes.
Gray Taylor is executive director of Conexxus, a c-store technology group based in Alexandria, Va. Reach him at gtaylor@conexxus.org.
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