Artificial Intelligence

As senior editor of Chain Store Age it is my pleasure to welcome you to the first edition of our new Customer Disruption e-newsletter. Every other Thursday, I will be presenting you with content from the Chain Store Age website and magazine highlighting how retailers are using technology to provide customers with the type of seamless, personalized shopping experience they have come to expect.

Chattanooga, Tenn. -- To increase control of its digital activities, SmartFurniture.com chose to implement a stable of proprietary and third-party analytics, campaign management, and optimization tools. However, the solutions lacked the functionality and flexibility necessary to capture, analyze, and transform data into actionable insights, so SmartFurniture.com expanded adoption of Adobe Marketing Cloud.

Kirkland, Wash. – VisibleBrands has raised approximately $2.3 million through a Series B financing to support a regional expansion of its patented in-store digital couponing platform. In preparation for the company’s regional expansion, VisibleBrands promoted Tim Belvin to CEO, succeeding founding CEO Tim Morton.

ChannelNet, a leading digital customer acquisition, retention and conquest marketing company, has named Angela Johnson as VP of account management.

The company will be looking to Johnson to help it manage growth. Johnson has more than 20 years of client relationship management and is an expert in developing multichannel solutions for the automotive, high-tech and insurance industries.

New York – Retail CIOs are preparing to take advantage of innovative technologies such as mobile, cloud and social, although they are less involved in efforts to leverage Big Data analytics. A new study of retail CIOs from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Forrester Consulting, “The Global Agenda of Retail CIOs,” retail CIOs plan to rapidly implement an array of mobile technologies, with context-aware tech (32%), mobile payments (28%), digital signage (24%), and mobile POS (22%) leading the way.

PassBee Media is rolling out a new iBeacon location-based marketing solution. The application is aimed at allowing retailers to target indoor or in-store consumers for increasing foot traffic, engagement, and sales.

PassBee’s iBeacon solution delivers in-store push notifications designed to create a more personalized experience and increase same-customer and same-store sales. For example; a customer checking out a particular outfit, could be served up customized suggestions for accessories to compliment it elsewhere in the store.

Amazon has reportedly obtained a patent for “anticipatory shipping,” or a logistics technique using customer behavior and history to prepare items for shipping before they are actually ordered. According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon received the patent in December 2013.

Seattle – Amazon.com has reportedly obtained a patent for “anticipatory shipping,” or a logistics technique using customer behavior and history to prepare items for shipping before they are actually ordered. According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon received the patent in December 2013.