The Guardian: Cognizant’s Senior Vice President of Retail Consulting Says Beacon Technology Offers Plenty of Opportunities for Retailers

“Beacon technology has enormous potential to enhance the shopping experience, making it quicker and easier for customers to access the information and products they are looking for, or provide special offers or discounts to loyal shoppers,” writes Steven Skinner. “Beacons are a type of a low-cost, micro-location-based technology that use Bluetooth low energy (BLE 4.0) for communicating with beacon enabled devices.” Excerpts:

“Beacon technology can also provide retailers with invaluable data about their customers’ shopping habits as well as the activity of their staff, allowing them to make improvements to the store layout by identifying store flow, maintaining service standards and operations that will benefit both customer and retailer.

For a retailer, there are several reasons why beacon technology is proving attractive.

First, there’s potential beyond the store. A beacon in a window display could be used to beam promotional information to people as they pass by. They could even be placed in bus stops, street adverts or tube stations to direct customers towards a specific shop before they go anywhere near it.

Beacons can also help a retailer recognize, reward and understand its best customers, increasing loyalty and building a stronger relationship with them. They can be used to track how many times a customer visits a shop, the departments where they spend the most time (to determine which displays are most effective) and the number of promotions/vouchers redeemed in order to monitor conversions. The technology also has the potential to let a retailer know when its most profitable online customers are present so staff can recognize and treat them accordingly.

Beacons could be used to keep track of staff efficiency. They can monitor how often and for how long members of staff engage with customers to help improve customer service training and track sales conversion rates. In addition, beacons could send alerts to members of staff when a task needs to be carried out, monitor how long each should take, and identify how staff split their time between the stock room and shop floor. Using beacon technology, retailers are also able to track vendor activity, monitor deliveries and ensure vendor compliance.

Retailers need to educate customers about the benefits this technology offers and demonstrate the unique benefits they wouldn’t get otherwise.

While the introduction of beacon technology poses various challenges, if retailers offer a genuinely beneficial and contextually relevant experience to customers, they will benefit from enhanced engagement and far greater insight into in-store footfall and customer and staff behavior.”

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