Authors:
Susan Brosnan, Daniel Goins, Patricia Hogan, Jessica Snead
Abstract:
Many types of orders may include supplemental free items that a customer may wish to pick up but must then be found after the order has been completed. The customer is already juggling purchases and may be in crowded conditions, so the solution is to use the POS to learn what Supplemental Order Items a particular customer or a particular type of order often requires and proactively direct the customer to those Supplemental Items.
Background:
When purchasing grab-and-go items at a grocery store, restaurant, coffee shop or events center, it's often frustrating trying to locate the extra items (plasticware, napkins, creamer, salt, drink top, etc.) that you need to best use/consume your purchase. Sometimes the "extra items" are commonly used, and the vendor might remember to tell you where to pick them up (like ketchup for fries), but others are less common and would frequently be unmentioned by the vendor (e.g. I like to eat pizza with a fork and knife). Especially in a crowded environment, it can be extremely difficult to find the extra items, and, in busy times, it can be hard to get the attention of or hear the vendor to ask the location. Sometimes, even knowing the location isn't enough, when the extra items are unintentionally hidden behind posts or other counters.
Description:
The solution is to help customers locate these extra items without having to ask a busy vendor for them. The POS Application can learn over time what extra items a customer uses and associate that with that customer, so that it can automatically inform the customer of the location of likely desired extra items.
The customer learning could take multiple forms:
In one embodiment, the store's camera system is used to watch the customer’s movement after leaving the POS to see what extra items the customer selects. It can associate items in the order with the extra items to learn over time if the customer always gets a particular extra item or only gets that extra item with certain purchases. This would be associated with the retailer's knowledge of the customer but could be used to form a more anonymous generalized view, so it could be used as a likely prediction for unknown customers.
In another embodiment, the customer's preferences are learned in a similar manner, but registered with the customer's payment method. That way, the customer could be learned in a more universal way, so that they could get similar direction for similar orders when using that payment method, regardless of the vendor.
In the simplest embodiment, the customer's preferences could be learned without cameras, by registering what the customer asked the Shopper Assistant for after certain purchases and extrapolating that toward other items of similar type.
The customer would then be directed to their determined extra items via one of several methods:
- Directions sent by the POS Application to display via virtual methods (like google glasses) to the customer
- Directions sent to the customer's registered mobile device via a map app (e.g. Wayz, Google Maps)
- Directions encoded in a 2D bar code (e.g. QR Code, Data Matrix) that could be scanned on the POS 2x20 display or receipt to feed a maps application
- Directions/Map are determined by the POS application and displayed on the POS 2x20 display or Receipt
- Directions could be sent by the POS Application to be displayed for each customer using holograms on the floor
- The POS Application determination could trigger a light over the extra item(s) typically preferred by this customer.
An example flow would look like:
- Customer orders coffee and Danish pastry
- Customer pays with Visa that alerts the POS Application of the Customer’s "extra" preferences
- POS Application determines that the preference for creamer matches the Coffee order
- No other preference appears to match
- POS Application sends directions in text to the customer's mobile phone with the location of the creamers
- Store cameras recognize that the customer also hunts around for the plasticware kiosk and takes a fork
- Customer fork preference is registered with the loyalty information and fed back to the tender used
- Customer preference application recognizes that this customer has picked up a fork with the 3 most recent pastry purchases
- Customer preference for forks with pastry is registered for the next time the customer purchases a pastry.
TGCS Reference 4015
