Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

And the time-honored Nordstrom thank-you notes might be triggered when a phone is detected, even if there is no employee interaction. At least this is the scenario Nordstrom President Blake Nordstrom is painting, according to one report of his speech.Read more...

Kraft Foods is experimenting with a grocery store kiosk that uses facial recognition to determine a consumer’s gender—and other things—and then to recommend products for dinner. But the kiosk also integrates with a mobile app, where its recommendations can be based on what consumers already planned to buy (shopping list access), and records everything into that customer’s CRM file.

Kraft’s efforts, described in a wonderful CPG Matters piece, is a good look at marketing self-discipline, where a line is drawn between what technology says can be done and what should be done. Put another way, how far can a retailer push it? When does “helpful” morph into “intrusive”? Given that the line is very different for an 18-year-old, a 30-year-old and a 60-year-old and that many grocery chains have a substantial number of customers in all three age groups, that can be a difficult decision to make. The story also talks about other variables the kiosk will consider (such as whether it’s before dinner time or hours after and whether it’s a Friday morning or a Sunday night) and several that it won’t (the facial-recognition software’s guess as to “height, girth or ethnic background”), because they were considered “too creepy.” Whatever happened to the good ole days, when a marketing scheme that wasn’t creepy wasn’t worth doing?…

The majority—if not the vast majority— of recent StorefrontBacktalk stories will still be available to read for free. So will our highly moderated discussion forums, which won't waste your time with spam and vendor pitches. But readers who aren't Premium subscribers will only be able to see the very beginning of Premium stories and columns—and they won't have any access at all to the Premium forums, private discussion groups, monthly reports or the archives of StorefrontBacktalk stories that are more than 30 days old.Read more...

The units, which JCPenney is calling Findmore, are also integrated with CRM databases, identifying customers' loyalty accounts by matching their payment cards. The chain was careful to avoid PCI issues by not directly storing the card numbers. "Once the customer gives the credit card information to JCPenney, it is immediately translated to a JCPenney internal ID and stored on database in the translated format. The credit card number is not stored in the rewards system," said Kate Coultas, a JCPenney corporate communications manager.Read more...

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) argued that when "Safeway learns that recalled products have been sold in its stores, it has a duty to disclose to customers that they face serious health risks or even death if they eat the recalled products. Safeway chooses not to notify its customers who purchased recalled products, thereby putting them at risk." Safeway, understandably, has a very different view. Safeway argues that there are good reasons for the industry to not standardize on such CRM-based alerts.Read more...

When the site crashed, it posted an apology message for visitors: "We're sorry. Due to a system issue, you may be experiencing an interruption in customer service. The issue is affecting Discover's automated phone system, as well as Discover.com." Systems weren't restored until Friday about 5 PM New York time.Read more...

It's called Beyond The Story because our discussion forums thus far have been limited to comments on individual stories. And we policed those comments strictly, making sure that they were indeed about the story they were attached to and that they were non-promotional, non-offensive and respectful. (Well, as respectful as IT professionals debating RFID, PCI, CRM and Mobile are likely to get. We don't seek miracles here.)Read more...

For years, Macy's has had an in-store policy of free shipping for anything costing more than $50 (with the standard list of exceptions). On January 25, the chain announced with much flourish that it will now offer free shipping (with a somewhat lengthier list of exceptions, some impressively vague) for online customers if they spend more than $100. No acknowledgment that Macy's has decided online customers must pony up twice as much money before they merit the free shipping offered to in-store customers.Read more...

Groupon just launched a New Year's holiday food program in Japan. The launch went so poorly—and by that we mean that it sold so really well—that Mason had to lose face with a positively painful YouTube video for customers. He opened with an admission that "we featured a deal in Tokyo recently that we really messed up," because its supplier couldn't handle the volume of orders.Read more...

When RadioShack announced Monday (Jan. 24) that its board had chosen CFO Jim Gooch as its new CEO, it went out of its way to mention Gooch’s background in supply chain management and IT. This is just the latest example of retail boards showing new found respect for IT experience when sizing up folk for the big CEO corner office, including Home Depot, which is watching its own CFO’s IT chops when evaluating her for the CEO gig plus related IT respect demonstrations from Sears, Macy’s and Borders.

This IT love-fest is consistent with a move—started about 5 to 10 years ago—of assigning the CFO to oversee IT. Before that, it was more common for CIOs to report into COOs or often CEOs. The shift to having CIOs report into the financial group is an acknowledgement that IT is becoming more strategic and that it’s an area that CFOs must master if they want to run the whole ship.…

As if we needed another reminder of just how big Wal-Mart is, the $400-billion gorilla released some updated data this month at the NRF Big Show on its digital signage program and online media at Walmart.com. For the Web site, the numbers are predictably huge: 1 billion ad impressions each month to 32 million unique visitors. For the Web and digital signage combined, the monthly reach in the U.S. is a staggering 100 to 150 million people, or between one-half and one-third of the U.S. population, according to Wal-Mart marketing director James Beck.

With that kind of reach, it may be a blessing that Wal-Mart is notoriously conservative in how it uses the digital signs. Wal-Mart doesn’t need to get any more of its customers’ attention; a 90- to 120-second message about a particular product on the digital signs can already double the product’s sales. If Wal-Mart got really serious about using sign technology to get customers’ attention, there might really be no attention left for any other retailer.…

Timothy Kasbe, a celebrated IT exec who arrived at the chain in February 2009 after having served as the CIO of India's largest retail chain, quietly left the company early last month. Very quietly.Read more...

Best Buy killed its profitable restocking fee policy and Amazon offered free super-saver shipping later than in any other holiday season, sweetening the deal with free next-day shipments for a large percentage of its hottest camera and video products.Read more...

Why little pain? A $399,000 settlement is not a huge deterrent for a $50 billion chain, but it might become more annoying if it spreads to many other states. The actions required—the halting of the deceptive kiosk program—are also trivial, as that program had basically run its course and mobile devices pretty much make it irrelevant.Read more...

To at least get a sliver of silver bells in for 2010, the chain is rushing to get the mobile devices activated by Saturday (Dec. 18) at its stores in the Chicago and New York metro areas. The rest of the chain will kick in by February 2011, according to a statement from Shopkick, the vendor handling the mobile deployment.Read more...

Also, retailers are creating not-so-small teams to deal with social interactions, teams they plan on paying for by cutting back on call center group staffing. That is a sound plan, but few are giving it enough time. By late 2012 or so, such staff re-allocations may start making sense. But certainly for 2011, double-staffing (adding to social teams without significantly taking away from still-popular call centers) will be necessary. Have you budgeted for that?Read more...

Although that's certainly true, it won't make a dent. Impulse purchases are indeed emotional, and rationality does not come nearly as naturally. For every in-aisle price- and feature-comparison that an Android or iPhone enables, there will be 20 purchases in the heat of the moment. And those impulse purchases will be enabled by mobile. Consider a movie whose star is wearing a really cute sweater or using an especially intriguing gadget. In the lobby seconds after the closing credits start to roll, consumers will be able to find and buy those items. That in-the-heat-of-the-moment urge to buy may have easily calmed long before the consumer gets home to a laptop. But the always-on mobile device will—for the first time—enable such emotional instant buys.Read more...

Borker figured out that any kind of comments from customers&38212;including really negative ones—would send his pageviews from Google soaring. Note: This didn't help him if a customer typed in his retail brand (Decormyeyes), but few prospects had a reason to do that. They'd be much more likely to type in major optical brands such as Ciba Visions, which Borker resold. Because of the Borker case, Google has changed its search mechanism. But that might be bad news for many legitimate retailers. Google is being cagey about the changes it made, but Google Fellow Amit Singhal did post a few comments on the Google blog.Read more...

Canadian consumers were promised price-matching on any U.S. Black Friday sale, but store associates took a far more limited view of things. There's no question that this issue illustrates a classic case of poor training and/or communication with store associates, which is hardly a Canadian-only problem. Such communication is difficult at any time of year, given the huge turnover of young associates. But when you add in thousands of temporary seasonal employees, the challenge becomes almost impossible. As much of an issue as employee communication is, however, that's not the key problem here. It's this phantom distinction some retail execs are trying to make between in-store and Web.Read more...

That kind of insider theft would never have gone unnoticed if it involved payment cards. But when retailers think about the security of loyalty-card data at all, they're usually focused on protecting personal information. Customer loyalty points have such a low value—typically 1 or 2 cents for each dollar spent—that it's easy to dismiss the risk of counterfeit points. Unless those point totals are treated like cash; in which case, an insider with the right kind of access can generate enough to cost a store real money.Read more...

In a standard Black Friday sale promotional news release, Borders on November 24 implored customers to join its Borders Rewards Plus program by November 30 and receive a $10 credit, which had to be used by Jan. 11, 2011. The good news is that customers listened and did what they were told. The bad news is that customers listened and did what they were told.Read more...

StorefrontBacktalk is moderating these two panels at the show, and we'd love for any readers to drop by. (If you don't boo, who will?) We actually have these wonderful IT giants discussing two of the most critical retail tech issues: Security and Mobile.Read more...

Many of the privacy arguments in Washington surround what advertisers can do online, but few focus on the data that retailers collect from site/mobile visitors. Does that mean that retailers are in the clear or merely that politicians have yet to figure out that loophole? In much the same way, Facebook's privacy restrictions focus on allowing others to access a member's information. But it says nothing about restricting what a user can do with his friends' info. In other words, consider the info that a Facebook user legitimately has about people on his/her friends list. Can they then share that with anyone else, without getting their friends' permission? And where do retailers fit in?Read more...

Really? We've seen lawmakers take their best shot at data security and privacy before. This time, it's a task force of bureaucrats trying to balance the demands of competing interests. But at this point, we don't need balance. We need clear rules for protecting customer data, and regulations with teeth so there's a meaningful penalty when data isn't kept safe. As it is, the Commerce task force has some nice ideas about voluntary privacy principles that won't go anywhere in Congress—and wouldn't help even if they did.Read more...

Starbucks' up-and-down history on CRM, mobile and the Web makes these latest stats historically interesting. Whether it is up or down, this chain is hard to count out. That's especially true when a $10.7 billion coffee house is reporting a loyalty program growing at 20 percent.Read more...