Choosing an Interactive Retail Agency: Five Questions Worth Asking

"Interactive retail" gets used for almost anything. It covers a tablet zip-tied to a fixture and a 2.5 metre watch that passers-by drive from their phones through a shop window. Both get pitched in much the same language, and the credentials deck rarely tells you which one you're buying.

If you're shortlisting agencies for an in-store build, these are the questions we'd ask. Ask them of us too.

1. What happens when nobody's standing next to it?

A shop floor is a rough place for technology. Real customers, full trading hours, kids, and nobody on hand to restart anything when it hangs. Ask to see something they've built that ran without a minder.

Ours is Montblanc. We put a 2.5 metre smartwatch replica in the boutique window and let people control it from their own phones after closing time, so the store kept selling with the lights off and the staff gone home. Customer interaction went up 31%. The full Montblanc story is here.

2. Can they show you a number?

"It drew a crowd" is a description. Ask what they measured and how they measured it.

For St George Bank we turned branch windows into interactive Christmas gifts using through-glass touch. Over six days it ran up more than 1,000 participants and 530,000 Facebook views, and nobody had to walk inside the branch to take part.

If an agency counts people, ask how. We measure dwell time and engagement anonymously and in aggregate, with no facial recognition and nothing stored that identifies anyone. An agency doing it differently should be able to tell you why.

3. Do they start with the problem or the product?

An agency built around one piece of kit will find a reason to use it. Ask what they'd recommend if the right answer turned out to be simpler.

We're technology agnostic, which in practice means the hardware gets chosen last. Diamond Exchange is a good example. Plenty of people don't enjoy trying on rings with a salesperson hovering, so we built a 3D hand-tracking virtual try-on they could use with no one watching over their shoulder. Dwell time went up, and so did conversion. More on Diamond Exchange.

4. How long have they been at it?

Interactive retail is young enough that plenty of agencies are on their first or second build. That's not a reason to rule anyone out, but it's fair to ask how many of these they've actually delivered and kept running.

Our automotive and retail work goes back about a decade. For Macquarie Bank we built MotoMe, which took a car buyer from an in-store display to a video wall, then a personalised shortlist, then a side-by-side comparison with a sales rep. It produced more qualified leads than a traditional showroom, and it gave Macquarie a name in car finance as more than just the lender. The full run is here.

5. Who's actually building it?

Ask whether the people in the pitch are the ones who'll build, test and install it, or whether it goes to a subcontractor the week after you sign. Neither is automatically wrong. You just want to know who to ring when something needs fixing on a Saturday morning.

If you're briefing one now

Joann Todhunter, Sales Director at Seqirus CSL, put it simply when she worked with us: creating interactive experiences is daunting. Most of the questions above come down to taking some of that away before you've spent anything.

All eight of our case studies are on the case studies page. If you've got a space and a brief, get in touch or call 0425 777 555.