Key Attitudinal Indicators (KAIs) by Confirmit

 

In the current economic climate loyalty and customer experience are being identified as key focus points for retailers looking to stay ahead of the game.

However this begs the question – how do you measure loyalty and customer experience?

Confirmit’s answer to this question is their feedback management software that uses event-driven online feedback surveys at key moments in the customer life cycle to measure customer attitude.

This traking of customer attiude can lead to the formulation of key attitudinal indicators (KAIs) which can provide organisations with a predictive measure of likely future performance.

 http://www.confirmit.com/solutions/industry/retail.aspx

Fujitsu lunches Customer Experience Diagnostic for Retail

Fujitsu Services has launched a new service that will help retailers measure the in-store customer experience.

http://www.fujitsu.com/uk/news/pr/fs_20090127.html

It looks like the offering uses multiple techniques to measure service delivery, such as transaction speed, queuing times, store layouts, mystery shopper audits and customer service benchmarks.

Once service delivery is measured they identify weaknesses, offer solutions to address the weaknesses and  then test the recommendations in a controlled environment.

Whilst very appealing on the surface I would be interested in the cost of solution and how they help retailers to maintain the changes they implement.

RFID and In-store Customer Insight

There is an exhaustive amount of material published about RFID technology assisting with logistics, supply chain and inventory management but little on its other potential applications.

Paxar and The Big Space in 2007 collaborated on the magicmirror http://magicmirror.thebigspace.com/

The magicmirror uses RFID technology to present product specific content to shoppers whilst they are standing at the mirror.

Asides from customer service and sales benefits the most relevant information comes from analytics in the background. One example is understanding interest vs. purchase – this kind of data can be valuable in helping retailers to optimise product mix and offering.

I am sure this is the tip of the iceberg for RFID and customer insight so it will be interesting to see what the future holds as the cost of RFID continues to decrease.

Social Mapping with Socialight

Socialight (http://socialight.com/) has created a google maps mash-up that allows users to tag geographic locations with content (text, photo or music) to be shared with their friends.

When members of the same social network come in close proximity to the location the content is then sent to their mobile. Socialight has its own member groups and has links into Facebook and Myspace.

This could be a great way for retailers to increase instore traffic by communicating with their members who are close by.

Socialight has a video on youtube that is great introduction to their service http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=9KeFXtRJLG8&eurl=http://socialight.com/

Social Technographic Profiles

Do you know how your target audience uses blogs, social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter ect), and YouTube?

Forrester Research have profiled and grouped the differing ways people use social computing sites into what they are calling Forrester’s Social Technographics®. They have identified six overlapping levels of participation – Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators and Inactives.

 

 

Understanding how your target audience interacts with social computing sites will go a long way when developming a social computing strategy.

You can get a feel for the profiling at http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html where they have classified 11 countries by age and sex for their relative Social Technographic® profile.

Emotion-recognition software

Dutch researchers from the ISLA Laboratory at the University of Amsterdam have developed a software application that can read human emotion.

The application detects the movement of thousands of tiny facial muscles working when we smile, frown of grimace. The Emotion-recognition software, or ERS, creates a 3-D face map, pinpointing 12 key trigger areas like eye and mouth corners.

A face-tracking algorithm matches the movements to six basic expression patterns, corresponding to anger, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust and happiness, or a mixture of them.

The university has created a company – Visual Recognition http://www.visual-recognition.nl/ to take the application to market. To date they have worked with Unilever to test responses of 300 European women to differing foods.

Unilever’s interest in the technology lies in market research where the technology may be used to test people response to low fat or calorie reduced foods.

The software represents an exciting opportunity for gathering of raw consumer response data. 

The algorithm can be tested at http://www.gladorsad.com/en/