Summary: Tech startups are helping retailers use mobile devices to change the way offline stores interact with customers. Today, we'll look at three such companies. iTunes: cs.co/tnp - Subscribe, listen to past episodes, rate the show or write a review. TRANSCRIPT for "Mobile Retail" written by Anne Field: Your in-store retail technology won’t do much good if sales associates don’t use it. That, ultimately, is the conundrum David Hegarty is trying to address. Hegarty is founder of two-year-old San Francisco-based, Signature Labs. Here's some background: Most high-end retail stores make the lion’s share of revenues from repeat customers, according to Hegarty. Excellent, personalized customer service, of course, is essential to inspiring more-frequent visits, especially to fancier enterprises. But these days, fewer retail sales associates are making a career out of the job. As a result, they aren’t developing the long-term relationships that were typical in the past. And fewer of them can make effective use of the so-called "black book," a list of clients and preferences with which they can let customers know when new items come into the store. The perfect solution, at first, seemed to be to have an app for customers, and another for retailers. But Hegarty soon discovered that while consumers were eager to adopt the technology, sales associates tended to be less enthusiastic. The issue, then, wasn’t as much about the technology as it was with what Hegarty calls "a behavioral change." With that in mind, he decided to just focus on the sales associate piece of the puzzle, introducing a simple retail customer relationship management system for high-end retailers aimed at quickly building trust between client and seller. The first step is educating sales associates about just why the technology is needed in the first place--that having frequently returning customers boosts revenues considerably. Signature’s head of sales associate on boarding does in-person training, in addition to providing computer tutorials. And associates who hit their targets receive one of various levels of certification. Then, there’s the actual application, which focuses on a few, key actions. For example, Signature’s system analyzes sales receipts each day to identify high-potential customers. Then, sales associates receive a notification and send written thank-you notes to those people. Thirty to 60 days later, they’re reminded to let customers know about appropriate new merchandise. Store managers also have a dashboard to keep track of it all. Hegarty says, quote: "We make it really easy for the associate to be thoughtful." Mountain View, California-based Proximiant is all about turning the ability for customers to make in-store mobile payments into a way for retailers to build stronger relationships with them--and get access to a potential goldmine of data. Here’s how the new service works: Retail customers with New Field Communication--or NFC-enabled devices--can get a receipt at the check-out counter when they tap their phones on a small digital receiver right at the point of sale. IPhones aren’t NFC-enabled, so it scans a QR code that appears on the receiver and is captured as a digital receipt. The big deal for retailers is they can tell whether a customer has already bought from their store previously and then start sending them promotions. Founder Fang Cheng also started a touchscreen display company called Touchco, which was sold to Amazon in 2010. Dinesh C. is vice president of business development and marketing at Proximiant. He says, quote: "The moment customers check out and get their digital receipt on their phone, we start building a relationship with them." End quote. More important is what happens once the data is collected. Retailers can customize data to allow them to see anything from whether a Twitter campaign turned into real sales, to the type of products that are doing well. And bigger retailers can choose
