Depending where you are, Amazon may be more likely to remember your name than a store employee who has helped you two or three times.
A group of Richmond entrepreneurs is hoping to change that with Regulr, a platform that will allow businesses to greet repeat customers by name – sending employees a push notification with their name and photo whenever they walk in the door.
“Consumers are expecting more. They want you to know their shopping preferences. They want that personalized experience,” said Stephen Dodge, one of Regulr’s four co-founders.
Dodge drew on both his tech background — he works in IT and did a stint in data collection with Bank of America — and his customer service experience as a former Nordstrom employee to develop Regulr alongside co-founder Ian Major. Early on, the pair teamed up with local innovation and design agency BLDR to develop their concept, adding co-founders Brandon Lewis and Luke Rabin to the enterprise.
Regulr relies on a fairly simple process. Both a business and a customer download the app, on which the customer creates a profile containing his or her name, email and photo. The customer can then decide to be a “regular” at a given business, and every time he or she walks in the door, location sensors will detect the phone and notify the employees of his or her presence.
Currently Regulr, which launched July 16, is undergoing soft testing to see how receptive people are to the technology, particularly in light of its privacy implications. Five local businesses including Quirk Hotel, King of Pops and Alchemy Coffee have signed partnerships with the startup to explore the app's uses.
“Obviously, businesses like it because they’re getting a deeper look into the customer,” Dodge said. But he’s also mindful of consumer fears about an app having access to an individual’s image, movements and habits, so the testing is intended to help the fledgling company find “the right balance” to benefit both sides of the business–consumer equation.
While Dodge hopes to see Regulr’s applications expand to include remembering a customer’s usual order and tracking information such as his or her monthly expenditures at a business, for the moment the startup is focusing exclusively on customer recognition that leads to a personal greeting.
“We want to build the experience first and then build the technology around it,” he said.
In fact, the apparently simple act of saying “Hello, Mr. Smith” goes to the core of Regulr’s mission, Dodge said: customer recognition is the first – and perhaps biggest – edge that e-commerce has over brick-and-mortar business.
The pilot is expected to last several months and Dodge hopes to produce enough data for the Regulr team to begin shopping around for more capital to further build out the product.
