The retail sector continues to grow and become more competitive, yet available technology helps keep them in the loop of competitiveness. Those of you working in retail have probably turned to various new business technologies to help organize your data and bring mobile technology to the fore. Other technologies continue to become useful, though, and one could soon change the way you do customer service.
Facial recognition technology isn't new, but it's making some inroads into the retail industry. Some are using this technology to bring more security to customers, as well as being able to better target customers on certain products.
Of course, questions of privacy are out there. Yet, it's worth exploring what this technology could do to provide more valuable customer data while helping bring convenient payment methods.
Checkout With Facial Recognition
The idea that we can go through a checkout line in a store and use our faces for identification might still look like an implausible future. It's already happening in some retail stores, if only in places like China. America is still looking carefully at what's happening in many American franchises within the Chinese mainland.
Most notably, it's a KFC in Hangzhou, China where you can pay simply by looking into a camera and smiling. Called Smile to Pay, it's becoming a standard technology there as a way to combat increasing identity theft.
Walmart filed a patent for similar technology five years ago. They have yet to implement the technology anywhere in the world, though, leaving China as the biggest experimenter at the moment. Even so, what other implications are there for facial recognition technology in retail?
In a time when people's privacy becomes increasingly vulnerable, you have to wonder how long we'll wait before this tech becomes ubiquitous in America.
Can Facial Recognition Truly Scope Out Unhappy Customers?
With Walmart's patent above, their intention is to use facial recognition technology to determine which customers seem unhappy. To show how practical this technology is, scoping out dissatisfied employees could change customer service as you know it.
Walmart wants to use this to place cameras (unknowingly) on customers waiting in line who may have a problem. Once the camera notices someone looking unhappy or making a complaint, specific employees get sent to the checkout lane to take care of the issue.
It all sounds like the perfect way to reinvent how customer service works. Even so, we'll have to see if Walmart can surmount the privacy issues involved.
At stake is also being able to gather information on customers to serve them better.
Retaining Customers You Already Have
As Business Insider notes in a piece about Walmart's intended facial recognition system, it's always easier to retain the customers you already have. It can become a chore to budget a new marketing plan to find new customers when existent ones have extreme value.
This is where facial recognition technology could make the most difference in customer relationships. Giving them peace of mind about their security and gathering personal data could help prevent them from leaving to a competitor.
Ultimately, Walmart's patent could become the new push to use facial recognition based on customer retention alone above the security aspects.
The sticking point is still whether customers would accept retail stores like yours gathering private data based on facial scanning. Also, how accurate will it truly be in gleaning big data you can use to deliver better products and services?
A lot of this is going to come down to proper data movement so you can properly communicate the data you receive to everyone in your store.
Here at RemoteRelief, Inc., we offer top-tier data movement and mobile device management platforms. Visit us to find out more about how we can help better manage new business technologies.