First Insight Inc. has rolled out a new “customer experience platform” for retailers and brands, which builds upon the technology provider’s product testing solution. The platform, “iCX,” aims to bolster sales and brand equity by offering brands improved customer engagement and segmentation capabilities as well as enhancing tactics to target new customer cohorts.
The platform uses various technologies, including some that allow brands to forgo physical samples when conducting digital testing as well as features that foster “customer-driven” product assortments.
The company said iCX aims to deliver “a seamless, tailored, rewarding experience to consumers through customized engagements, flexible segmentation capabilities, personalized offers and more” and that the platform is “fast and combines enhanced customer insights with product-level analytics to enable companies to increase speed to market and deliver assortments that are truly customer-driven.”
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First Insight’s solutions offer retailers and brands a competitive edge via “voice of the customer” data and predictive analytics, and chief executive officer Greg Petro said iCX arms companies with “an enhanced customer experience” solution that is “more engaging and personalized, leading to increased loyalty and conversions.”
“The new platform also incorporates some of the latest technologies such as image recognition and survey branching, allowing our retail partners to derive even more value from the First Insight solution,” Petro added.
Regarding the enhanced customer engagement tools, First Insight said it made the digital-testing process “more exciting and seamless” through an interface that features the “look and feel” of the brand or retailer. “The solution also enables the use of 3-D virtual prototypes and provides the ability to present rotation and movement, making the engagement more immersive,” the company said in a statement. “These capabilities result in higher consumer response rates and enable retailers and brands to eliminate physical samples when performing digital testing, both of which drive speed and create dramatic cost savings.”
Other capabilities of the iCX platform include “tailored insights” using survey or “conditional branching,” which empowers brands and retailers to create more personalized engagement. “Through conditional branching, also known as skip logic or survey branching, question responses can be used to specify relevant follow-up questions and also to direct consumers to the best or most relevant insight based on their interests,” the company explained. “These capabilities enable retailers and brands to gain more detailed insights from target segments, including new customer groups and competing retailers’ or brands’ customers.”
Other features of the platform include allowing brands and retailers to offer “individualized, single-use coupon codes,” which enables companies to link the incentive to the targeted consumer who is providing the insights. “This results in a higher level of consumer engagement and loyalty as well as higher conversion rates, while reducing overall promotion costs,” First Insight noted.
Other features include “cannibalization and incrementality” analysis functions, which can help retailers create more optimized, and customer-driven assortments.
Michael Pao, vice president of product management at Crocs, said the company was “eager to start using this new customer experience platform to dig deeper into the ‘why’ behind customer behavior — why customers like [or don’t like] a product, or why they will pay more.”