The Philips system enables Carrefour to provide new services to its customers, such as helping shoppers to navigate and find promotions across the 7,800 square metre shop floor. In addition, the LED lighting will reduce by 50% the total lighting-based electricity consumption of the hypermarket.
"We are always on the lookout for innovations to facilitate customers' navigation in our stores and meet consumers' expectations," commented Céline Martin, Director of Commercial Models and Innovation for Carrefour hypermarkets in France. "Thanks to this new application, which uses Philips technology, we are now able to provide our customers at the EuraLille Carrefour with a new service, enabling them to quickly search and locate their preferred promotions or detect all the promotions around them when in-store. A real time-saver for an urban customer base!"
Philips indoor positioning system consists of LED fixtures, a cloud based location database and a Philips software development kit upon which customers can build their mobile interaction platform. The system in operation at the Carrefour hypermarket in Lille comprises 800 linear LED fixtures that use patented Philips VLC (Visible Light Communication) technology to transmit a unique code through light that is undetectable to the human eye but can be simply detected with a smartphone camera, without the need for any additional accessories. As part of the installation, Philips software and cloud-based location database has been integrated into Carrefour's mobile app. The "Promo C'ou" mobile app was created by Think&Go and can be downloaded from today from Apple's App Store in France.
"We are leading the way with connected lighting for retail with Carrefour," comments Gerben van der Lugt, Head of LED-based indoor positioning at Philips Lighting. "Our connected lighting system has the potential to transform shopping into a more interactive and personalized experience. At the same time it will enable retailers to differentiate themselves, enhance customer loyalty and provide new services to shoppers."
Indoor positioning can support a range of location-based services that make shopping a much more interactive, personalized, and fun experience. These services can include way finding, product finding, and personal couponing. In this way, retailers can offer shoppers personalized experiences to increase satisfaction, improve customer service, encourage brand loyalty and, ultimately, drive sales.
Furthermore, indoor positioning can add value for retailers in terms of staff efficiency. Staff can locate and find products more easily, can tag issue reports with location information, and can get location based re-stocking instructions. Transmission of positioning data even works when the lighting is dimmed. Once installed, access to location information can be controlled by the retailer so they can directly manage the customer or staff experience.
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