By Robert Koolen, President,
Scala
It’s good to read positive articles about digital signage in media that as yet do not routinely cover our industry. CRM Buyer last Friday featured an article that discusses the results of a study into the effects of digital signage by analyst firm Aberdeen Research published earlier this year. For a link to the article see this link. I thought there were two interesting observations: the first one that digital signage can and does have a significant and measurable impact on such things as customer loyalty and retention (+30%) and the perceived shopping experience and customer satisfaction (+46%) even at an early stage, as recent adopters have reported. But even bigger gains come with building experience with the medium and investing resources, as early adopters of the technology have found. The early adopters have been working with the technology longer and have invested more resources than recent adopters. For instance, the early adopters report customer retention increases of 49% and customer satisfaction improvements of 65%. From a digital signage industry perspective that means it is not just about the technology, but how you learn to use it most effectively. This represents an opportunity to help customers get up to speed faster by sharing best practices and helping them avoid the mistakes that others already made; experience with the medium clearly matters a lot. For customers there is also an unmistakable message; the quality and experience of a vendor’s ecosystem and how they share their expertise can play an important role in the success of their deployment.