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Alex Richardson offers tips on assisted selling

In his seminar at The Self-Service & Kiosk Show on Feb. 13, Alex Richardson laid out the trends he's seeing in assisted selling devices in retail. Richardson, founder of software giant Netkey and now managing director for Selling Machine Partners, began with a brief history of the kiosk industry, then jumped forward to discuss how some major retailers are implementing self-service technology.

February 20, 2006 by James Bickers — Editor, Networld Alliance

In his seminar at The Self-Service & Kiosk Show on Feb. 13, Alex Richardson laid out the trends he's seeing in assisted selling devices in retail. Richardson, founder of software giant Netkey and now managing director for Selling Machine Partners, began with a brief history of the kiosk industry, then jumped forward to discuss how some major retailers are implementing self-service technology.

And he had some interesting insights into those major initiatives.

"Women control almost all purchasing decisions in our economy," he said. "Generally, women buy everything. They run the world."

This point dovetailed into Richardson's analysis of how a typical female customer might view the different components she encounters as she passes through a retail store.

"What problem does she want to solve in those five square feet of space, at that particular time?" he asked, showing that in a typical retail store, a customer might encounter dozens of different points of decision. His advice was to opt for micro-solutions rather than macro - small, non-networked devices that are dedicated to their portion of the store, rather than holistic units that can solve any problem from anywhere.

For examples he pointed to the shelf-front product info kiosk developed for Starbucks, and Home Depot's "Ask Henry" video information box developed by Apunix. With the latter, he emphasized the importance of simplicity: "It comes in one box, the store plugs it in and it works."

Richardson also referenced the successful kiosk initiatives from luxury car company BMW, noting that customers embraced the devices for innately human, psychological reasons.

"Customers trust the computer, but they don't trust the car salesperson," he said. "It's a fairly complicated decision to buy a $75,000 car."

He predicted a "massive proliferation" of digital assisted-selling devices over the next five years, and pointed out that in order to be effective, they need to incorporate rich media.

"Consumers have been so trained on rich media, they expect it inside the store," he said. "You have to have it. Â… Pictures turn information into understanding."

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