Case Study: DIY In-Store Interactive Kiosks Using Intuiface

No, don't believe it. You don't have to spend $100k+ in app development to bring interactivity into your stores. Omni-channel retailing does not require a PhD. Creating retail experiences that rival what your customers can enjoy at home does not depend on world class developers writing code for weeks. If your in-house design team has the desire, they have the ability. For proof, we present Telenor Hungary. (Click Telenor Hungary is the second largest mobile phone operator in Hungary. Founded in 1994, Telenor today serves more than 3.4 million subscribers and operates 40+ stores in that country.

Telenor's stores are the single most influential touch point with their customers, capturing not just company values but establishing their reputation as a modern, cutting edge company offering customers the latest in mobile technology. In that spirit, Telenor wanted to dramatically upgrade their stores by mixing physical and digital experiences into one great in-store shopping experience creating a digital journey for customers.

Telenor wanted to
dramatically upgrade their stores by mixing physical and digital experiences
into one great in-store shopping experience

The question was how? There was the obvious option: contracting a 3rd party for custom development. Could this be done cost effectively? Telenor had their trusted agencies but felt it important to ensure there weren’t alternatives offering lower cost, faster delivery and higher control.

Maybe the obvious alternative to outsourced development was to bring their website into the store. Yes, it ticked all the boxes - low cost, fast delivery, high control - but it was underwhelming. It certainly wasn't an added incentive for prospects and customers to leave the comfort of their home. This realization presented a fourth box that needed to be checked: unique to the in-store experience.

It was around this time that someone wondered if there was a middle ground between use of a home-grown website and outsourced development. Was it possible for the internal design team to build something unique, memorable and engaging? Telenor did have a team in charge of customer experience design. Is there no way to put those skills to use?

It was around this time that someone
wondered if there was a middle ground between use of a home-grown website and
outsourced development. 

With this new frame of mind, a small amount of research turned up Intuiface. "Digital Interactive Experience Creation". Too good to be true?

Telenor began their skunk works analysis of Intuiface early in October 2015. Over the next few months, Telenor's design team poked and prodded Intuiface, using the extensive self-education material to help them create a variety of retail-themed multi-touch experiences  So good was the online documentation and so intuitive was Intuiface itself that Telenor at no point saw the need to submit a question to Intuiface Support or to Sales!

The conclusion of Telenor's Intuiface evaluation? For far less cost, in much less time, with far greater control, the in-house design team could create unique and engaging in-store experiences that would rival anything created by a 3rd party. And if that wasn’t good enough, Telenor didn’t have to worry about reliability or scalability as quality was a responsibility taken seriously by the software itself.

In early May 2016, Intuiface licenses were purchased to run a 13-store pilot, each store introducing Intuiface-based content on four separate displays. The first four stores opened at the end of June, a mere two months after license purchase. The other nine stores were opened by the end of September. Telenor raved, “Our first project with Intuiface was a breeze. We could progress fast and easy, and the end product is exactly what we aimed for.”

“Our first project with
Intuiface was a breeze. We could progress fast and easy, and the end product is
exactly what we aimed for.”

In addition to rapid time-to store, Telenor's in-house design team was able to adopt an agile process, permitting rapid iteration through both changes and experiments. Supplemented with Intuiface's remote deployment capability, Telenor could quickly test ideas in-store, evaluate their effect, then enhance or reject as needed. Such turn around would have been impossible with outsourced work. In fact, using such a self-driven process for in-store digital enhancements had been unheard of.

Telenor is currently gathering shopper engagement metrics using Intuiface’s data tracking capability, preparing for deployment of interactive content into 20 more stores in early 2017 for a total of 33 stores equipped.

Telenor's in-house team had the courage to try their own hand at interactive content creation with Intuiface and the work has paid off. Both cost savings and agility, thought to be at odds, have been achieved.

Do you have the courage to create interactive store kiosks?

Read more about this topic on the sixteen-nine blog.