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| Demonstrating the Smart Retail CX |
The Concept
The ideas behind 'smart retail' entail many varied strategies for improving the customer experience through technology. Although the focus is generally on the customer, it's also important to recognize the benefits to the retailer as well. Since most of the technologies involved are connected devices, it becomes possible to gather a number of metrics related to the entire customer flow. With access to this data the retailer is able to easily determine over/under performing products, effectiveness of the marketing, audience analysis including age and gender, and even conversion rates for individual products (ie. products engaged vs. products purchased). We wanted to demonstrate all of these aspects of a smart retail implementation in order to provide a more complete picture.
The Hardware
A wide range of displays from ViewSonic were used in the demo from a 96" all the way down to a 9". Most of these were 'smart displays' with integrated Android OS allowing us to run Revel Digital software right on the display with no additional hardware. We also utilized a 'smart shelf' display for the middle of the booth. These types of displays are designed to mount directly to the front edge of store shelving.
The lift-to-learn shelving incorporates an RFID reader along with dynamic LED lighting. The shelves detect the presence (or absence) of an item which triggers the lighting within the shelf to change color along with sending a signal to our software.
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| Every shelf in the booth is instrumented with lift-to-learn technology |
The Customer Experience
It was important to implement all aspects of the customer experience in order to help the visitors to our booth quickly visualize the concepts involved. For this we created the following:
- Smart shelving for detecting product engagement
- Large poster wall for product details
- Check-out display for making the product purchase
- Audience triggered advertisement
When a product is lifted, each display will transition to product specific functionality. The poster wall will show product details and the check-out display will allow the customer to make the product purchase. Replacing the product on the shelve transitions back to attract modes. Each shelf also indicates it's state by changing color. This makes it easy to identify the shelf associated with the product. The centered display was running our audience analytics software which showcased the ability to modify display content based on viewer metrics including age and gender. It also included some visualizations (charts and smiley face) to underscore the ability of Revel Digital to perform playlist modification and audience measurement in real-time.
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| Smart Shelving with RFID and LED integrated |
The Retailer Experience
For the retailer it's the data which is most valuable. A number of data points were collected over the course of the show including the following:
- Audience metrics including impressions, age, gender, dwell time
- Product interactions
- Product purchases
Using the Revel Digital Adhawk analytics tool we were able to show not only the audience profile, but also which products were interacted with and which products were ultimately purchased.
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| AdHawk analytics of the show data |
From this we are quickly able to determine some interesting data points:
- 7858 to visitor impressions
- 4086 unique visitors
- 4 second average dwell time
- The most active hour of the entire show was Thursday at 10AM to 11AM with 650 impressions
- The majority of visitors were in the 25-34 age range followed by 35-44
- Most visitors actively watched the display for between 5 to 10 seconds at a time
- 56% of the visitors were male, 8.3% female
- 852 total product interactions
- Most product interactions occurred on Thursday from 10AM to 11AM which correlates with audience metrics
- 117 customers added a product to the shopping cart
We can also utilize our funnel chart capability to determine the conversion percentage, in this case for the shelf containing the Bluetooth speaker.
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| Funnel chart indicating conversion rates for the bluetooth speaker |
Here we see there were 5066 viewers, 167 of those picked up the product, and 21 of those ultimately added the item to the shopping cart.
It's easy to see how a retailer could take advantage of all this data.
Conclusion
It was another great InfoComm for us and would like to thank ViewSonic for including us once again in their booth. As always we will be pushing hard to create the next best thing in digital signage and hope to have more great solutions to showcase next year!
