StrategyMag

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

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

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

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

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

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

Green

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