Self-Service and Real-Time Analytics

As I had written before, the consumer-facing market is migrating into more and more of a self-service model with the prevelent use of ATMs in banking, self-checkout and self-ordering devices in Retail and Hospitality, and the growth of eCommerce online merchants. This channel obviously provides the consumer and the merchant with some advantages (convienence, efficiency, etc.) but it has one notable disadvantage. This disadvantage is obviously the lack of person-to-person interaction in these exchanges. In such an environment, how does the consumer feel that she is "known" and the merchant able to conversely "know" the consumer?

In businesses where self-service works well, the merchant has to "know" the consumer based on her previous interactions with the company. What are her tendancies, history, affinities, etc? Based on the occasion that she is shopping within, what type of merchant offers will be relevant to her? This type of knowledge requires "real time analytics" in the sense that the shopper's behavior is analyzed and her tendancies are known... and then based on the predicted shopping occasion (fill-in, splurge, pantry filling, convienence trip, etc.) can the merchant offer her an incentive to make that visit more profitable for the merchant and more valuable for the consumer?

Obviously, in the eCommerce world the merchant will know through the contents of the consumers' shopping basket and her session clickstream behavior. Is this possible in a brick and mortar world? Is it possible without real-time basket information? Possibly... but this would require that the shopping and occasion data is available and the patterns are analyzed on every customer... something that requires sophisticated analytical CRM tools and an active data warehouse environment with the horsepower to support it (obviously the merchant needs to know in some way when the consumer is interacting with them). In the banking world, this can effectively be handled through the ATM device similarly to the way Amazon would offer a next best offer from a purchase.

However, what would the ROI on consumer marketing efforts be if, like eCommerce, you could analyze and dynamically offer value-added services in the midst of the shopping occassion... at the point of purchase instead of the point of sale? There are some mechanisms for doing that today, but they are by no means segemented. There is one retailer that is experimenting with self-scanning technology within the store... if this could be married to the offer and relationship management technology it could be a huge win for them, both in terms of understanding their shoppers but also in marketing effectively to them on their terms.