Personalising the retail experience

Jack Loo | July 30, 2012

Motorola Solutions believes in helping to build a retail store that understands individual preferences.

Motorola Solutions' vision for its presence sensing and location-based tools portfolio is to transform 'the store' into 'my store', according to its business development director for retail, Anand Mehta.

For instance, a family of four can be alerted to different show times, special enclosures and souvenir stores based on their known preferences or general profile. Mehta shared with Computerworld Singapore the presence and location technology landscape of the region.

1) Retailers in the region can be very cost conscious and slow in adopting technology. What is your go-to-market strategy then?

In the last two years, we are seeing retailers assessing the adoption of technology against its impact on business. Technology valuations are also being based on return on investment (ROI) rather than capital expenditure.

Put simply, it is all about the business case and that is how it should be. Our go-to-market strategy is thus aligned with our customers - we must have business impact with a fair ROI.

Organisations do not have the time or expertise to experiment with conceptual solutions of the future. At Motorola Solutions, we do an incredible amount of internal analysis, leveraging our domain knowledge, before speaking to some of our customers and developing a POC (proof of concept) with them.

The retail industry is an incredibly competitive environment. The market forces are driving the need for differentiation among retailers, and this can only be delivered through innovation.

How does one differentiate a pair of jeans? We all understand the generic segmentation of premium, mid and value-driven brands and consumers. How then do you differentiate within these sub segments given that there are a host of options available to the consumer simultaneously, even for seemingly similar items?

Our view is that differentiation is driven by increased interaction with the end-user and an intimate understanding of their preferences. The data collection, analytics and alerts prompted to achieve this have an endless number of permutations that simply cannot be done manually.

2) Some of the retailers seem to have the oldest systems around. How can your systems work together with legacy platforms?

Integration with legacy systems is not an issue for most of our solutions. Motorola Solutions' Proximity Awareness and Analytics can work with the customer's existing Wireless Local Area Network platform.

This solution enables retailers to detect, analyse and act on location information from a wi-fi device, all using their existing wi-fi network. We use the information collected by the customer's existing infrastructure, in conjunction with information collected from Motorola Solutions' infrastructure, to detect customer proximity and calculate accurate location co-ordinates. We can then feed this information back into the customer's CRM system for the retailer to take action.

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