Company News • 27.02.2011

NCR introduces personalization platform for self-checkout terminals

Industry first enables retail marketers to deliver promotions more effectively, reduce check-out times and enhance consumer loyalty

NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR) today announced the industry’s first software platform to offer a personalized experience for consumers at self-checkout based on a consumer’s individual preferences. Through this ability, retailers can provide a unique and differentiated shopping experience, deliver promotions more effectively, further reduce checkout times and enhance customer loyalty.

Customers can set their preferences for self-checkout through the retailer’s existing loyalty program, or a preference management solution such as the NCR Enterprise Preference manager (see related NCR release: converged channel shopping gets personal as NCR introduces consumer preference management solution.) For example, consumers can select a personal theme (such as logos of a sports team), choose Spanish as their preferred language, indicate that they are left-handed and that they prefer to receive digital receipts*. When the shopper arrives at the store and scans their loyalty card or mobile device, the software provides this information via Web Services to the self-checkout terminal, prompting it to adapt to the customer’s stated preferences.

The new software also features innovative learning technology that automatically adapts to a consumer’s shopping history. For example, the software can automatically populate pick lists at the self-checkout for frequently purchased produce items. This capability will further reduce checkout lines and wait times for customers.

This new personalization capability is part of the NCR c-tailing™ solutions, which are a set of software and services that enable retailers to offer consumers greater personalization and consistency across channels, such as the Internet, mobile devices, social media and in the store. These converged retailing solutions enable retailers to differentiate themselves, lower operating costs and attract today’s empowered and elusive consumer.

“Consumers today expect retailers to understand their preferences based on their presence in a channel and deliver personalized, differentiated offers,” said Mark Wallace, solution marketing director, NCR Corporation. “Personalizing the self-checkout experience enables customers to create a shopping experience more relevant to their needs and helps retailers to build closer relationships with customers and deliver a converged retailing experience.”

Additional preferences enabled in the initial release include selectable themes, which allow the consumer to personalize their self-checkout display screens with a variety of retailer-defined options, such as sports or music.

The software release is available to new or existing NCR SelfServ™ Checkout customers.

Millions of consumers use NCR SelfServ Checkout at more than 150 retailers from 12 different retail segments and over 22 countries around the world. NCR recently has been ranked again as the global market leader in self-checkout, according to VDC Research Group and Retail Banking Research (RBR).
 

channels: cashpoints, self-checkout systems, epos software