What if you knew more information about your customer than ever before? What if that information told you where they are, what they normally buy and what they need next? How would that transform your business and the way you related to customers?
Can you have too much data? Can you know too much about each customer and their network of referrals who might do business with you? We are all about to find out. This will be bigger and more significant to your business than the introduction of bar codes, which we use to track the movement of everything from a box of toothpicks to a boxcar full of lumber heading north.
Remember your world before bar codes? It's hard to remember business, inventory and sales without them. What do you know about RFID? It's bigger than bar codes.
Read this: RFID Set To Change Everything and you'd see how a decade old technology known as radio frequency identification is taking off. As you read that article, just notice how many RFID devices you have in your own daily living. It's more than you realize. You might as well go ahead and tag your ear, like a wild animal in the Antarctic, so we can watch your every movement with satellites and become experts at studying the movements of you, as a customer.
RFID uses an integrated circuit and a mini antenna to transmit identifying information wirelessly to a receiver. RFID reduces the time and labor needed to track objects while improving the accuracy of the transmissions. How many RFID devices go with you and tell the world your every movement and patterns of buying? What about that EZ-pass on your car allows you to zoom through the Speed Pass lane while others are waiting to try their luck at hitting the basket with their handful of toll coins?
What about your cell phone? It's a radio transmitter, for crying out loud! That's the easiest way to know where all your customers are. It's a handy way for parents to know exactly where their children are.We have the technology today to do that--"beam up" someone you are looking for.
What about that time saving little wand thingies on your key chain that you use at the gas pump to let them know "you've arrived and your are ready to gas up."? Same thing. And did you realize your credit card has an RFID chip in it? My American Express Blue even uses that chip as part of the card design. What is means is it is entirely possible to just pick up what I want and walk out of the store, and a receipt for all of those goods can be ready at curbside, when the valet brings my car around.
Sometimes customers are called patients. Do you ever get sick of being sick? How many times have you filled out the same forms with the same information every time you visit a doctor or medical care facility? What if your medical history--up to date with the last pill you took an hour ago, went with you? That means no more repeating your medical history, for one.
Mount Ascutney Hospital has already contracted with a New Hampshire technology firm to test an RFID system involving patient bracelets and staff badges. In tandem with the 99-bed Windsor hospital's other information networks, the RFID innovation is intended to ensure patients' identification and location while delivering medical data to the point of treatment.
What does RFID mean to your business? How will you use it to tune in --literally, to what your customer wants you to know about their every movement and needs? If your marketing slogan boasts about how much you listen to customers and give them what, how will you stand out when every business can know what you do, just by being an RFID player in the world?
More important. How is this a small business advantage? How nimble are you? How quickly could you act on the information that you learn abut customers and prospects? How valuable can you become when you know who is actively seeking what you offer?
Comments