Customer analytics from Anonymous In-Store Customers (In-Store Shopper Analytics)

How to Perform Data Analysis on Anonymous Customers who have Purchased In-Store with Cash

Customers who shop irrespective of whether they have loyalty card leave a trail during payment, Their Credit Card Data stores vital information and can be used for subsequent analysis (Payment Card Industry - Crucial for Real-Time Next Best Action (NBA) - Big Data)


How to Track Anonymous Customers

Tracking Anonymous customers (visitors) on the web is quite easy nowadays. The Cookies, IP
Addresses etc provide a wealth of information and this can be used when the visitors return. Tools like SAS, SPSS, +IBM Smarter Analytics and Manthan Systems's ARC Customer Analytics provide anonymous visitor behaviour analysis .

How about Anonymous Customer in Store and analysing their behaviour. Companies like Catalina uses the information of buying preferences of customers to drive promotions, merchandizing and sales. Catalina claims their data and insights are unique.

Aggregate data from Customers provide rich information about Brand Preferences etc.


Video Analytics is also common in Retail nowadays. RetailNext, uses video footage to study how shoppers navigate and pushes appropriate messages/promotions

RetailNext also uses data to map customers’ paths. What is interesting is the ability to differentiate men from women, and children from adults from anonymous data

How it Works:
Most often the Analytics provider rely on Wifi Pings, the Shopper's phone when it searches for WiFi provided by the retailer, pings the Router and the Router captures the signal strength to identify the location

Euclid Analytics also uses WiFi data to understand the footfalls, the time spent at each aisle etc. Also it measures the signals between a smartphone and a Wi-Fi antenna to count how many people walk by a store and how many enter.

+Cisco's Meraki wireless router has a feature called Presence, which has a good location analytics dashboard that measures key anonymous visitor tracking metrics - Capture Rate , PasserBy, Visitors, Median Visit Length, Repeat Visitors etc.

This information can be used for better in-store promotions, Point-of-Sale displays etc. Cisco Meraki has partnered with Facebook to provide Free WiFi in lieu for providing some information

Amazon is testing its own WiFi network. Currently Amazon devices access the internet through its Whispernet service, which runs on AT&T’s 3G cellular network

Real-Time Customer Feedback

Annik has launched ‘Rapid Insights’ specifically for companies who operate retail stores and want to understand & track customer feedback in real time. The real benefit of this solution lies in taking corrective action in real time to improve overall customer experience. This revolutionary technology is extremely user friendly and can be implemented in retail stores easily.

How it works?
-- Placing of tablet at the retail outlet with platform agnostic proprietary customer feedback module
-- During the retail journey, customer shares experience through tablet
-- The management accesses real-time dashboard to view customer feedback and take corrective action

Create Right Mood at Right Time using Experience Players 

Customers doesn't come for Price/Offers, they come for good customer experience, which is why the retailer need to create Right Mood at Right time. Philips Retail Solutions (PRS) helps retailer create memorable in-store experiences with its Experience Player (EP). EP is a clever little black box that allows one to control individual experiential assets, whether it be animated on-screen content, atmospheric light levels or audio. The player can be scripted or programmed with a sequence of events within a set timeline. This solution is ideal for a Garment boutique or Clothes Retailer

iBeacon and LTE Direct

With more devices on Customer's hands, getting their attention becomes a top priority when they are inside / near the stores

iBeacon
Apple's new mobile notifications system iBeacon is being touted by big brands as the next great opportunity in advertising. Using tiny Bluetooth wireless transmitters affixed to buildings, iBeacon lets companies send iPhone owners specific pop-up notifications based on their location and proximity to stores and products. These iBeacon transmitters need not be a separate device but some of these transmitters are simply iPhones as iPads running iOS 7, which lets these device act as both iBeacon transmitters and receivers

LTE Direct
+Qualcomm's LTE Direct technology is touted as an alternative to iBeacon because of the Privacy it brings. LTE Direct is a device to device platform (synchronous) that helps proximity detection apps in battery efficient manner.
Its discovery is connectionless and is only based on proximity, allowing the devices to discover others without revealing their own identity or exact location. Devices in proximity read the 'expressions' for determining the relevance of one another. This is meant for the autonomous discovery

Fabric is the product of Powered Analytics, Inc., aiming to bring an Amazon-like shopping experience into the physical store. Fabric works using Beacon technology -  it learns the store floormap and tags products and categories with their location in-store. Integrating the application with Web and Mobile applications (Apps) would ensure that the shoppers are tracked across channels, and their location is used to predict the right product at the right time across channels

This way In-Store (Brick & Mortar) customers can be delighted by leveraging the data from their online experience and vice-versa

Read then Follow Now - How to Chose Right Channel - Using Social Media Analytics

Derive Customer Insights from Social Media Information by Big Data Analytics


Not so long before people (or customers) read newspapers, browsed magazines, visited libraries . Then came Web - people browsed, then came the +Amazon Kindle Fire a Book library in your hands. Now it's an era of Social Media where +LinkedIn , +Twitter and +Facebook have made them as Followers!

Yes people follow a lot - +The Boston Globe , and +Bloomberg News is available on Twitter and Facebook. You can subscribe, follow them . You can follow +CIO , +TechCrunch if you are a technology geek. If you are a marketer then +marketingprofs might be in your following list, +Nike and +adidas will be for a Sports geek

So what these tells us .. in the first place it gives some understanding about the customer's behaviour. Why is this so important for any marketer.

Social Media, Marketing and Segmentation

Marketers now use Social media extensively for communicating with their customers. They also use the massive volume of Tweets, Likes to get more insights about the customer.

A simple analysis carried out by a Watch manufacturer shows that those who have bought their premium watches are followers of  GeorgeMichael (+GEORGEMICHAELORG GMORG) Is it time to tap them?

How to Merge Social and Customer Data

Clustering or Segmentation of the data using a combination of Customer, Transactional and Social data is beneficial as it will find homogenous groups.

To arrive at the point - Social media data needs to be aggregated. This is where Big Data comes into picture (Refer How is Apache Hadoop used Big Data Analytics and Inteligence ). Companies like +Hortonworks , +Cloudera Inc provide Hadoop clusters where Social media data can be crunched to get the relevant information out.


Here care must be taken to include/excluded Social data as segmentation variable as it has huge potential to skew the result

Social media information can be used either as :

• Segmentation Variable
• Interpretation variable

The cluster profiling would reveal the impact of the social data. For example, a Retailer found that customers who retweet have constantly responded to a type of promotion. Share your own experiences



See also
How to Segment Social Media Users (Influencers / Detractors / Recommenders)