Ace Hardware Starts A Voice Recognition Trial for Finding Products
Written by Evan SchumanAugust 18th, 2009
Rick Baalmann, who heads up the St. Louis area stores for the 4,400-store Ace Hardware chain, said he often wants to get in and out quickly on shopping risks so he warmed quickly to a vendor pitching a service to tell customers—via their cell phones and voice recognition—the exact location of products before they arrive at the store. Whether customers will warm to it, though, is a very different issue.
The idea is for shoppers to phone the service and then speak the product name and the automated voice system will say the exact location of that product. If it works, the system's creators envision successor systems that will turn that consumer phone number into an impromptu CRM customer-identifier. Baalmann, who will try the system at a store in Desperes, MO (right outside St. Louis) starting Tuesday (Aug. 18), already has people ready to call manufacturers this week to sell them the ability to send text codes to customers who ask about certain product categories.
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