RFID: Improving the Customer Experience

GoodGreen

2009-11-18T15:57:00.003-06:00

Speaking today at the 3rd Good and Green Conference in the Chicago Cultural Center.

Good And Green is designed to teach mainstream national marketers the techniques, benefits and bottom line impact of connecting with today’s ecologically-concerned consumers through green marketing efforts.

Of course, RFID can help.

NYspeech

2009-08-23T21:04:00.004-05:00

Packing today, leaving tomorrow, taking more books than clothes.

Prepping for Wednesday's presentation at CRM Evolution 2009, the annual national conference of the CRM industry, held at the Marriott in New York. Premise: RFID makes CRM easy, effective and inexpensive.

WineRoom

2009-03-31T16:57:00.007-05:00

Wine Room in Orlando, Florida was hopping on Monday afternoon--and no wonder. An RFID-powered experience lets customers sample any wines they choose.

Here's how: You buy an RFID-embedded card (min. $10), choose from labeled wines at about a dozen wine stations. Slip in your card and you're automatically poured an ounce of wine. The price is deducted. You can sample other wines until your card runs out or you reload it--or you're too loaded to reload.

Brilliant. thewineroomonline

UofWisconsinRFIDLab

2009-03-14T09:29:00.009-05:00

Check out post by Dr. Alfonso Gutierrez of U of Wisconsin E-Business Consortium on mobile marketing, proximity marketing and relationship marketing sides of RFID. Article

StrategyMag

2009-03-06T17:16:00.008-06:00

RFID: Improving the Customer Experience,
Focuses on One-to-One Marketing in Real Time

Technology Opens Doors for Many Industries to Improve the Customer Experience

Imagine a telephone repairman finding out what's wrong with equipment at the top of the pole without having to climb it. Or a supermarket cart that only offers coupons on the things you like, or a hospital tracking system that never leaves some patients waiting to get out while others wait to get in.

The opportunities for today’s businesses are virtually endless with the rapidly emerging radio frequency identification (RFID) technology – opportunities not only for increased efficiency and accuracy, but for improving the customer experience.

Author Mickey Brazeal explores the possibilities through the eyes of the customer in his new book, RFID: Improving the Customer Experience, now available through Paramount Market Publishing, Inc. www.paramountbooks.com

“RFID technology is exploding because it has the potential to solve so many long-standing business issues,” Brazeal explains. “When organizations understand the possibilities the technology holds to improve the customer experience and gain a competitive advantage, the adoption of RFID technology will be rapid and profound.”

From Strategy Magazine
March/April issue
By: Steve Richardson
Other RFID articles in StrategyRFID Articles

GuestBlog

2009-02-23T08:48:00.005-06:00

Guest Blogging for 1to1 Media. Here's this week's excerpt (You guessed it, RFID provides an answer):

How about solving this nightmare? Imagine a business in which every item you sell comes in four styles and two colors and seven waist sizes and eight leg sizes and the customer for one of this set of nearly identical items is not a prospect for any other item in the set. Imagine that customers come in every day and move the items around in unpredictable ways. Imagine that each of these items has a full-price lifespan of only about 30 days. Then imagine that, of all the people who are lured into your store by its expensive location, expert marketing and reduced prices, 60 percent to 70 percent go away without finding what they were looking for. That's apparel retailing in the U.S. How do any of them survive?

Customers pick up stuff in one place and put it down someplace else, and it's gone -- unsellable until someone else finds it and puts it back. Customers take a too-small size into the changing room, and that results, more often than not, in a lost sale.

RFIDWorkGroup

2009-02-14T08:42:00.002-06:00

Yesterday I met with the University of Wisconsin's RFID WorkGroup. Wonderful presentations from senior people grappling with all the complexities of making an application keep its promises. Alfonso Gutierrez of the university's RFID Lab runs it. Specifics are confidential, but I came away with a sense that a few people are finding ways to squeeze out enough short-term ROI to keep projects alive even in this disastrous economy. I spoke on marketing applications of RFID and where new marketing applications will come from in the future.

EcoRFID

2009-01-31T11:21:00.010-06:00

Andres Botero of SAP provides an insightful overview of RFID's green side. He cites reducing spoilage (EG by monitoring the cold chain), waste, product recalls, carbon emissions, landfill to name a few. http://www.rfidproductnews.com/issues/fall2008/expert.php

Good memory, too. He talks about pertinent applications from an RFID World speech I gave last fall. He adds that CHEP, a client of SAP's has launched a reusable pallet program.

Superpowers

2009-01-16T18:35:00.002-06:00

From the first page of the book, "What would you do if you knew where everything is? Suppose that, as suddenly as Spiderman, you get this superpower: you can know exacly where things are. Whatever things you're interested in. Millions of things."

RFIDiscourse

2009-01-16T18:27:00.004-06:00

Today I'm writing my speech for the University of Wisconsin on February 13, '09. Its working title is"Marketing Applications of RFID."

Green

2008-12-29T08:33:00.008-06:00

How could RFID have saved thousands of tomatoes from destruction? "Industrial Control/Design Line" ran key ideas from my recent speech, "RFID and the Rise of Convenient Sustainability":

"The government of Hawaii got a well-deserved award at RFID World 2008, for a system of RFID tracking to promote food safety. With RFID tagging of every bin and case of produce, it can be tracked all the way from one corner of a field to the end-user, and then backtracked all the way to the field again, if there is a problem. When food recalls are necessary, they can be swift and small.

They can avoid the massive environmental wastefulness of fiascos like the one the US just went through, in which some people got sick, so we jumped on the tomatoes and threw away fields and fields full of somebody's tomatoes, somebody's irrigated and cultivated and fertilized and harvested and transported tomatoes, and then decided it wasn't tomatoes after all and threw away fields and fields of somebody else's peppers. Sinking tanker ships is not the only way to waste fossil fuels and damage the environment. Food safety regulators, unaided by RFID, can be drunken sailors too."

To see more "RFID and the Rise of Convenient Sustainability"go to industrialcontroldesignline.com/210604775?pgno=3

2008-11-07T16:30:00.000-06:00

Here's what you'll find inside the book:

Chapter 1: Introduction-A Search Engine for Things
Chapter 2: RFID and Relationship Marketing
Chapter 3: Customer Relationship Management with RFID
Chapter 4: CRM 2.0 is Customer Experience Management
Chapter 5: Personal Identification and Privacy
Chapter 6: Asset Tracking Creates New Business Media
Chapter 7: RFID and the Retail Experience
Chapter 8: RFID and the Greening of the Customer Experience
Chapter 9: RFID Authentication and Product Safety
Chapter 10: Admission, Permission, and Tickets
Chapter 11: RFID in Payment Systems
Chapter 12: RFID and Patient Relationship Management
Appendix: How RFID Works

Pictured here are RFID library pedestals in the UK. I hope my book makes it into that library. Since they can make sure it won't be stolen, more people will get to read it.

2008-11-07T16:07:00.000-06:00

The title is finalized. The cover design is complete. The footnotes have all been double-checked. The last of the blurbs for the book jacket arrived at the publisher today. Can the book possibly be finished?

I guess it must be so, they're taking pre-orders at paramountbooks.com

After a full year of writing, I've begun teaching again. But it looks as if more writing is in store for me. I'm considering an offer to write a monthly column on RFID and the Customer Experience.

At work

2008-06-15T10:17:00.000-05:00

Adding final edits to the chapter on technology.

RFID/Customer Experience book coming soon

2008-05-25T08:29:00.000-05:00

Paramount Publishing has contracted for the publication of RFID and the Customer Experience. It's currently in the editing process and will be released in late 2008.