Barcodes is one of the effective ways to make the customer interaction interesting and fruitful. How? Bar codes have been employed on a good number of magazines, advertisements, and on products in retail stores. There’s good reason for this early interest. If used well, bar codes specially the 2D Barcodes are an inexpensive way for organizations to interact with consumers on the go. Using their mobile devices, consumers can photograph these carefully placed codes and find—via the Web—additional product information, coupons, and mobile tickets.
Already, well-known brands such as Dr Pepper, Dominos, Ford, Kraft, and Sprint have gone ahead with 2D campaigns using Microsoft Tags. (Other types of 2D bar codes include Aztec, Bee Tag, DataMatrix, Ezcode, QuickMark, and QR code) There’s “a monumental increase in companies that are willing to go out on a limb and do experiments with the existing media they have in print.
According to Microsoft Tags, Italy is home to more mobile phones than people (about 1.5 per person). Perhaps that is why Italians have become so familiar with 2D bar codes. 2D bar codes also have introduced a new tracking component to marketing, because the ability to identify where a customer has seen your code is powerful. Because customers agree to share their location information when scanning a tag, 2D bar codes offer another way to assess the engagement of an audience. When considering what has prompted this enthusiasm for bar codes in the West, many respond that the increasing accessibility to smartphones has left consumers open to the experience. A developer of 2D bar code solutions, says that the customer benefits most from using 2D bar codes. Through mobile connectivity, consumers can get a fuller, richer multimedia experience that can offer them everything from discounts to warranty information to nutritional facts. It’s up to the brand to promote this experience as desirable.
Overcoming Obstacles
For many marketing departments, 2D bar code dollars make up just a slim slice of the mobile pie. Companies may not be allocating a lot of funds for 2D because the medium is considered experimental by marketers and analysts alike with slow user adoption. For those who are adventurous, there are some caveats. So far, the universal pain point with bar code software is consumer education: Persuading consumers to download the application to their phones, take notice of the bar code, and understand the benefits has proved to be difficult.
Consumers need to be educated and suggests that phones come preinstalled with bar code software. Adding instructions next to bar codes on advertisements, explaining to customers how they work and why they should want this additional experience with a brand. It’s always that first interaction. If we can make the first interaction valuable to them, [consumers] can continue to use it.
The “dead links” in 2D barcodes can dissuade the customer from using bar codes beyond the first experience. Consumers will be deterred from using mobile codes if they initially have an unsatisfactory experience. So-called ‘dead links’, in which scanning a mobile code does not return any information or the wrong information, can be damaging, not only to a given campaign, but to the adoption of mobile code marketing in general.
Already people have high hopes for the future of 2D bar codes. A lot of vendors are hoping that [2D bar codes] will take off so that they can sell some analytics packages that can go with this. But should bar codes escalate to what vendors and customers expect, the question remains whether they will eventually give way to visual search applications, such as Google Goggles. Being able simply to photograph a Coke can, for example, and get information would bypass the need to scan a bar code. The bar codes eventually will become visual search but that a lot about customer behavior must change beforehand. The consumer has yet to get accustomed to the concept of photographing something to get more information about a product.
CRM Barcodes & RFID
Barcodes provides effective means to do a CRM in the Organization. Recently we got an opportunity to work with one of the big retail group company in MiddleEast. The core vision of their CRM project is to bring about effective monitoring and on time inventory fulfillment to their end customer using Siebel VanSales Application and Barcode Integration. The VanSales representative would be visiting the Food Retail Markets in the route designated to him and his visit to the shop will be confirmed only on successful read of the Barcode embedded in a designated location of Food Retail mart. This information will be captured using Handheld Devise running Siebel Application. The information records the visit time as well as make the goods delivered to the customer on time as promised. The Future of Barcodes have lot more in store with intelligent chips embedded this could also provide the information about how much is in the Shelf Space of particular retail unit and how much of it has reached the end customer.
The other interesting fact is RFID (radio frequency identification ) and Barcode Combination could do wonders to track the customer loyalty information.
Imagine That “Imagine going to the grocery store, filling up your cart and walking right out the door. No longer will you have to wait as someone rings up each item in your cart one at a time. Instead, these RFID tags will communicate with an electronic reader that will detect every item in the cart and ring each up almost instantly. The reader will be connected to a large network that will send information on your products to the retailer and product manufacturers. Your bank will then be notified and the amount of the bill will be deducted from your account. No lines, no waiting. “ . RFID tags, a technology once limited to tracking cattle, are tracking consumer products worldwide. Many manufacturers use the tags to track the location of each product they make from the time it's made until it's pulled off the shelf and tossed in a shopping cart.Outside the realm of retail merchandise, RFID tags are tracking vehicles, airline passengers,
RFID tags are an improvement over bar codes because the tags have read and write capabilities. Data stored on RFID tags can be changed, updated and locked. Some stores that have begun using RFID tags have found that the technology offers a better way to track merchandise for stocking and marketing purposes. Through RFID tags, stores can see how quickly the products leave the shelves and who's buying them.
In addition to retail merchandise, RFID tags have also been added to transportation devices like highway toll cards and train passes. Because of their ability to store data so efficiently, RFID tags can tabulate the cost of tolls and fares and deduct the cost electronically from the amount of money that the user places on the card. Rather than waiting to pay a toll at a tollbooth or shelling out coins at a token counter, passengers use RFID chip-embedded passes like debit cards.
But would you entrust your medical history to an RFID tag? How about your home address or your baby's safety?The Bar is getting raised everyday and we would see much exciting CRM revolution with more intelligent barcodes and RFIDs .
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