Coupons By Touch

San Francisco -- With many grocery chains nationwide already offering its pay-by-touch technology as a convenient payment option for shoppers, Pay By Touch is now using finger-scanning to improve grocery store customer service. Its new SmartShop kiosk allows customers to scan a finger and activate their store loyalty card to get personalized coupons.Pay By Touch announced in January that it had publicly released the program, following a 2006 pilot test at Green Hills Market, an independent grocery store in Syracuse, NY. The SmartShop program can be bundled together with the Pay By Touch biometric payment service, or it can exist alone in a non-biometric version. "The kiosks with the personalized marketing will change the way people go about shopping and getting their savings and discounts," says Caroline McNally, executive vice president of brand management for Pay By Touch. "It's not about brand switching, but about getting more of what you'd want anyway."Unlike traditional checkout coupon dispensers, Pay By Touch encourages grocers to place kiosks at the entrance. Shoppers receive a customized printout of 12 to 16 offers -- the number determined by Pay By Touch to give shoppers the most satisfaction -- from frequently purchased private labels and national brands. Shoppers redeem the deals by scanning again at checkout, and the offers refresh once per week."The key difference is that you are focused on the front end," McNally says. "Today when you are shopping, loyalty cards give you coupons when you check out, but when you have bought a Pepsi, it may give you a coupon for Coke. SmartShop makes a database of what you shop for, so when you go to the store or check online, you can see what's available to you and print off relevant offers." A recent study by the Boston-based Aite Group found that Pay By Touch kiosks gave Green Hills a 22% coupon redemption rate last year. The industry average is less than 1%. "The whole point is to increase the relevance of marketing communications to shoppers," says Gary Hawkins, CEO of Green Hills. "We realized that our ad flyer wasn't meaningful to our customers any given week, so we wanted to put the coupons in front of our customers. Now they are shopping more, we're retaining them better, and we're getting more household members."McNally says Pay By Touch hasn't heavily explored ad placement, but it does work closely with product manufacturers as well as the storeowners themselves. Grocers can contact Pay By Touch to update information and coupons saved on Pay By Touch's IBM-hosted servers. There is also 24-hour customer service, though routine maintenance is handled by the store.Before rolling out SmartShop, Pay By Touch introduced temporary kiosks to allow shoppers to enroll in the basic Pay By Touch payment service, which allows customers to make debit card, credit card or direct checking charges with a quick finger scan at checkout. Pay By Touch has outfitted more than 2,400 locations with kiosks for 3.3 million service members of its biometric payment service.

Coupons By Touch

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