Submitted by: Liz Rogers
Imagine walking into the shoe department at a large retail store. You find a pair of shoes that you want and instead of waiting for a sales associate to come to you, you use a mobile app to scan the shoe using image recognition (IR) technology and it pulls up the current inventory of that shoe. Lets take it further – the mobile application offers geolocation and is able to pinpoint the specific shoe department that you’re located at in the country. In a matter of seconds you’ve determined if that store has the size that you’re looking for. With the assistance of image recognition the app could also recommend similar shoes to the customer that are also available in your size at that specific location. With mCommerce, you could buy the shoe and alert a clerk to bring the purchase directly to you. The customer that purchased the product did not require customer support, is satisfied, and the retailer did not incur unnecessary customer support costs.
The example I just provided is how I imagine every large retail store to interact with customers within the next 3 years. In order for retailers to compete, they are going to have to adapt to the newest model of customer service. The new customer shopping experience will extend to pre, in-store and post-product use. Tools like image recognition and geolocation allow retailers to know what customers looked at, for how long, at what location, and how often before purchasing. Mobile applications customized for retail can also gather data on post-product experience to better serve customers and reduce returns.
Here are some important concepts to take away from image recognition:
I truly believe that image recognition is here to stay because it’s a feature that customers will find helpful in making purchases and a feature that retailers will realize increases revenues. What do you think?
Liz Rogers is a Social Media Community Manager for Parallel 6, a mobile technology and multichannel engagement company that created an easy-to-manage enterprise mobile platform called Captive Reach. Captive Reach allows companies to utilize mobile for internal and external business purposes. Pre-built modules reduce costs associated with custom development and systems integration. The platform is built with module-based components that can be leveraged for marketers in industries such as retail, healthcare, hospitality, gaming, and enterprise B2C and B2B.
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