Des Moines Business Record
01-08-07
Downloading that personal touch
By Jim Pollock
jimpollock@bpcdm.com
Complete strangers knowing your likes and dislikes by means of a computer chip
that you carry with you. Using that information to sway your decisions. Spooky.
Big Brother-ish.
Or, here's another way to look at it. If you walked into a store, and the salesman
knew your preferences even though he had never seen you before, "that's the
kind of personalization of selling that you don't get a whole lot of anymore," says
Anthony Townsend.
Townsend is a professor of management information systems in the
College of Business at Iowa State University, and he thinks it's about time
bricks-and-mortar stores caught up with online retail. Right now, computers seem
more helpful than people do.
When you visit Amazon.com, for example, the screen suggests things you might
find interesting, based on previous purchases. Of course, sometimes the screen
seems to be on powerful mood enhancers. But sometimes, or eventually, the
screen makes you think, "Hey, good idea."
The same thing used to happen in the small-town hardware stores that we can
just barely remember now. The kindly old gentleman behind the counter - or the
gruff jerk, depending on where you grew up - knew you, knew your parents and
probably knew quite a bit about how your particular house was put together.
As a result, you were likely to get what you really needed. And if he
recommended something you didn't ask for or even know about, buying it was a
pretty good bet.
Now you do business at stores where you don't know anybody. And you have the
uneasy feeling that if you did get to know the employees, most of them wouldn't
be there on your next visit anyway.
So Townsend thinks it would be a good idea if somebody dragged storekeeping
into the 21st century.
"The closest we get to customer relationship management in a real store is those
little tags for reward programs," he said. "Those are great, but they just get you to
come to the store and send you things via e-mail. If we would do things like we
do online, when you're in the store, they would know your size, know what you
bought last time and have information about your wife, so when you come in to
buy an anniversary present, you don't buy the wrong size."
This would have helped one of Townsend's friends a lot. Through a serious
misunderstanding of women's clothing sizes, he bought his wife a size 39 jacket.
She was not a size 39. She was not happy, either.
Townsend foresees customers carrying their full range of stuff-buying data on a
radio-frequency-identification chip in a key fob, or maybe signing on to a
computer after entering a store. He thinks this could work in any retail
environment involving salespeople.
"When a salesman comes up to you, he can pull up that information and talk to
you about whatever it is they're selling," Townsend said. "It would really be cool if
we had a national syndicated system where people could opt to participate. Not
only would the service improvement be significant, but the store could say, 'If
you're willing to let us help sell to you better, we'll give you rebates and special
pricing. It's a two-way street."
Unfortunately, Townsend doesn't see much action along these lines, and he
realizes that a fair number of consumers will automatically take a stand against it.
It's hard enough to get some customers to tell the cashier their ZIP code.
"People think the store wants to use information against them somehow,"
Townsend said. "But I think we're missing an opportunity for returning back to the
kind of service you used to get when you went to a little downtown shop."