Focus on Escalate Retail's new Pocket Kiosk

Retailers, imagine a kiosk your customers bring to the store with them.

Escalate Retail has recently introduced a novel approach to increasing in-store purchases with what it's calling its "Pocket Kiosk," what amounts to a retail kiosk running on the customer's own smartphone.

The new kiosks are part of Escalate's "All-Channel Commerce" solution that helps retailers leverage their brands and their inventory across a wide spectrum of channels, from social media sites to in-store kiosks.

And the pocket kiosk is the company's most novel all-channel assault on shoppers' pocketbooks.

Using a reader app on their smartphone, shoppers can use their phone's camera function to read a Microsoft tag, or some other kind of QR (Quick Response) code, sending the phone's Web browser to a dedicated URL that acts as the Pocket Kiosk.

Shoppers can then log in to the site — much like they would online on their PC or laptop — and view their own shopping history, wish lists, special instant rewards offers, and even go ahead and make purchases either at the store in which they're standing or at another location that has an item out-of-stock in their current locale.

"The kiosk has now been personalized to me," said Dave Bruno, Escalate's director of product marketing. "And it's chock full of that cross-channel information that I can now put to use to do exactly what our customers are asking us to do, help them find more ways to duplicate the Internet rich shopping experience in the store to close more sales."

If a shopper is standing at the shelf, say at a Kohl's location, looking at an in-stock item, they can also find out more information, like customer reviews, additional product details or the item's availability in other sizes/styles/colors at other Kohl's locations — just like they could if they were at the Kohl's Web site. That should lead to more buys in the store, Bruno says, and fewer instances of shoppers standing in one store and shopping in another store online on their smartphones.

"We feel, and our customers are telling us, it's imperative for us to help them to find ways to present more of the kinds of information they're looking for to their shoppers in the stores and leverage their investments in non-store assets to improve the store experience and close more sales on the floor," he said.

Shoppers have become spoiled by the wealth of information available to them on the Internet, Bruno says, and they're almost taken aback now when they go to a store and can't get that level of product immersion.

"Now I've got all those kinds of things that we've come to expect while shopping online that we don't get in the store," he added. "Now I have it in the store, in my pocket, and I don't have to ask a salesperson for help; I don't have to wonder if the item is in stock if I want three more of them; I have all that information available to me to help close that sale in the store."

And deployers can use the pocket kiosk and the standalone kiosk as a POS self-checkout device, depending on the deployer's preference, Bruno says, except there's no cash drawer obviously.

The idea for the Pocket Kiosk came to Bruno last summer, he says, while he was shopping for a printer for his wife.

He went online to do research, found one he liked at a big retailer's Web site, and went to the brick-and-mortar location a mile and a half from his home to buy it. But when he got there, he found another printer that looked like it might be a little better, for about the same price, which led him back to the retailer's web site, where he couldn't get much information, and then using a nice smartphone app on to Amazon.com, where he could.

So while the retailer spent tons of money on real estate, electricity and air conditioning, employees and shelf space to get him into the store, Bruno says, he ended up doing business somewhere else even as he was standing there.

"I'm standing in their store, and I bought it on my phone," he said recently. "So I said we as a company have got to come up with something to help our customers battle ‘the poachers.' That's what I call them; they poach your business."

But of course shoppers could do the same thing, even while shopping with the Pocket Kiosk, minimizing that page and pulling up Amazon.com or another shopping app on their phone. What the pocket kiosk does to prevent that, Bruno says, is make shopping a more personalized experience with the shopper

"First and foremost I'm going to be more inclined to do business with the brand that is most relevant to me," he said. "So now I (as the retailer) have given you a toolbox of things that help you on your shopping visit to do business with me…It knows who I am; it knows what store I'm in; and it knows what I'm shopping — and it knows what I like to buy."

And with the pocket kiosk, as Bruno likes to point out, the store is out virtually nothing in terms of cost, beyond the expense of setting it up in the first place. There's no equipment cost, and the network it runs on is either an in-store wi-fi system or more likely a cellular phone company's 3G network.

"Heck, the shoppers pay for the hardware," he said. "The consumer's got the kiosk in their pocket."