Patent Application
20160055498
The present invention generally relates to systems, apparatus and methods for obtaining consumer survey responses from a payment account holder at a point of interaction and then using that information to predict future consumer purchasing behavior. In an embodiment, consumer survey question responses to a brief consumer survey are obtained at, for example, a point-of-sale (POS) device during a purchase transaction, and a personalized commercial is displayed to the cardholder.
Businesses strive to obtain knowledge about consumers in order to ensure that their business will be or will remain successful. For example, the development, manufacturing and marketing of a new product or service can represent a significant investment of time, effort, money and/or resources and thus many businesses will attempt to collect information about consumers who may be customers and/or prospective customers of such new products and/or services. In some cases, a business will hire a marketing company and/or a researcher to directly ask consumers questions concerning their identities, preferences and/or behaviors. The questions may be designed to solicit certain information about particular consumers or types of consumers, such as customers who reside in regions in which a business owns retail stores, and/or who belong to a particular socioeconomic group of consumers, and/or how often the consumers shop at the business' retail stores, and/or what factors influence their purchasing decisions, and/or what factors influence their consuming preferences. This information may be obtained by orally interviewing consumers, and/or by using written questionnaires, and/or by organizing focus groups, and/or by using telephone surveys or online surveys.
For example, a conventional print survey may be included with a purchased product, which requires a consumer to take the time to respond to survey questions provided on a self-addressed postage-paid postcard and then to mail it back to the manufacturer. But such surveys are ineffective when it comes to busy, lazy and/or indifferent consumers, and therefore only target certain personality types who will actually take the time and effort necessary to respond. Similarly, consumers who are asked to visit a website after completing a purchase to participate in a survey may not do so for the same or similar reasons, and thus substandard results are obtained because information from only a small portion of potential customers is captured.
To improve the response rate of print or online consumer surveys, some merchants offer incentives such as rebates, discounts, coupons and/or special offers to those persons who respond to survey questions. However, such programs can skew consumer responses, for example if the consumer thinks that his or her response will have an impact on the size or amount of the promised incentive. Furthermore, incentive programs often result in capturing responses from only extremely cost sensitive consumers, which may exclude the most valuable type of consumers who are more likely to pay full retail prices.
Furthermore, consumer survey responses can often be inaccurate, which can lead to skewed or inaccurate predictions regarding the probably of success of a new product or service or concept. An inaccurate forecast can be embarrassing for a business and/or a manufacturer and/or for the marketing agency that conducted a new product or service pre-launch survey, for example, which predicted a high purchasing level based on inaccurate consumer survey responses.
The inventors therefore recognized that an opportunity exists for providing methods and apparatus for improving the accuracy of consumer survey results data, which data could then be utilized and/or analyzed to provide accurate consumer preference assessments and/or accurate predictions of consumer purchasing intentions.
Features and advantages of some embodiments, and the manner in which the same are accomplished, will become more readily apparent with reference to the following detailed description taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, which illustrate exemplary embodiments (not necessarily drawn to scale), wherein:
In general, and for the purpose of introducing concepts of novel embodiments described herein, provided are systems, apparatus and methods for obtaining consumer survey question responses to a brief survey during payment card purchase transactions at a point of interaction. The consumer survey responses are stored in a storage device, and a personalized commercial message is transmitted for display to the consumer (or cardholder) on a display screen at the point of interaction. In some embodiments, the consumer survey responses are used to perform consumer intent and action analysis. In particular, one or more predictions concerning that cardholder's future purchasing behavior may be generated and provided to an entity or entities (such as a client organization and/or a product manufacturer and/or a service provider and/or a merchant and/or a financial institution).
For example, a consumer who is a payment card account holder (a cardholder) makes a purchase at a point of interaction (POI), for example, at a retail store cash register (otherwise known as a Point-Of-Sale (POS) device or POS terminal) by swiping his or her credit card through a card reader associated with the POS device. Once the payment card is swiped, a display screen of the card reader may first present to the consumer an option to participate in a brief consumer survey in exchange for an incentive (such as a discount or rebate). If the cardholder provides an indication agreeing to participate, then a brief (for example, one, two or three questions) consumer survey is provided via the display screen of the cash register (the point of interaction). After the cardholder provides the required response or responses, in some implementations a personalized commercial message is generated and then displayed to the cardholder on the display device. The commercial message may be for a product or service of one or more entities involved with the consumer survey poll, and may be targeted to or customized for that cardholder based on, for example, the cardholder's historical purchase transaction pattern. Moreover, in some embodiments the cardholder's purchase transaction data and associated survey question responses are analyzed, over a predetermined time period, to determine one or more consumer purchase predictions and/or other consumer behavior predictions associated with that cardholder. The consumer purchase and/or behavior predictions can be provided to, for example, a product manufacturer, a services provider, and/or other types of businesses or organizations.
It should be understood that the brief consumer survey presented to the consumer at the point of interaction (such as on a display screen associated with a cash register) consists of only a few questions (for example, only one to five questions). The consumer survey questions may represent a small percentage or small portion of a consumer survey poll that contains many questions, and thus may be presented to the cardholder in a linear manner (or a piecemeal manner) over a predetermined time period (such as over a three-month period). It is generally known that consumers are more likely to agree to participate in a consumer survey and to answer survey questions truthfully if the consumer survey consists of a small number of questions as responding does not require too much effort from and/or take up too much time of the cardholder.
Consumers who own payment-enabled mobile devices, such as a mobile telephone that includes payment circuitry, can pay for a product or service by bringing the payment-enabled mobile device close to, or into contact with, for example, a contactless reader device of a merchant. In such cases, consumer data, such as the Primary Account Number (PAN) of the cardholder's payment card account, is read from the payment-enabled mobile device by the merchant's contactless reader device and then transmitted to a payment system for processing. According to some embodiments described herein, in exchange for an incentive such as a discount of the purchase price, the cardholder may then receive a brief consumer survey on a touch screen of his or her payment-enabled mobile device (such as on a Smartphone display screen) during payment processing. In such cases, the cardholder uses the touch screen of his or her payment enabled mobile device to respond to the consumer survey question or questions. Once the response or responses are entered and then transmitted by the payment-enabled mobile device to the payment system, the consumer may then receive a targeted and/or personalized commercial message on his or her mobile device. The consumer survey responses may then be recorded or stored in association with that cardholder's payment transaction data for later analysis in accordance with embodiments described herein.
Examples of consumer contactless payment-enabled mobile devices that could be utilized in such a manner include, but are not limited to, an iPad™ (or other tablet computer), an iPhone™ (or other type of Smartphone), a laptop computer, a digital music player, and a personal digital assistant (PDA). It should also be understood that the consumer could utilize other types of payment-enabled devices, such as a proximity payment card (such as a “PayPass®” proximity payment card offered by MasterCard International Incorporated, the assignee hereof), and in such cases the consumer survey may be provided to the cardholder, for example, on a touch display screen of the merchant's proximity card reader device (or other display device) which can be used to accept cardholder responses to the survey questions.
In some embodiments, the enterprise data warehouse 114 includes a single data storage unit that contains other data warehouses or databases. The databases may be utilized and/or populated, for example, as a result of purchase transactions and/or by receiving responses to consumer survey questions and/or by the results of cardholder intention prediction processing and/or by other processes described herein. In some implementations, the enterprise data warehouse 114 contains a purchase transaction database 116, a consumer intention database 118, a historical information database 120, a demographic information database 122, a consumer profile database 124, a consumer survey database 126, and a consumer incentives database 128. Alternatively, the enterprise data warehouse 114 may be a logical representation of a grouping of such databases.
In some embodiments, the purchase transaction database 116 may include one or more databases configured for storing processed cardholder or consumer and merchant transaction data reports (for example, actual payment card account purchase transaction data associated with a cardholder and one or more merchants). In some embodiments, each transaction data report may include payment card account numbers that identify the consumer or cardholder (for example, a credit card account holder, or a prepaid card account holder, or a debit card account holder) and other or additional purchase transaction information. Examples of additional purchase transaction information include, but are not limited to, a purchase transaction amount (for example, in U.S. dollars or in Euros), a merchant or seller identifier, a retail store identifier, a POS identifier, a purchase transaction date, and/or a purchase transaction time. In some embodiments, the purchase transaction database 116 contains data corresponding to specific transactions in accordance with client requirements and/or survey output requirements, which may be for a specific period of time. For example, the purchase transaction database 116 may include a MasterCard™ purchase transaction database that records the actual purchase transactions conducted by users of MasterCard credit cards and/or debit cards and/or prepaid cards for a particular category of merchants (for example, shoe retailers or restaurants of supermarkets). In some embodiments, the purchase transaction data stored in the purchase transaction database 116 may be collected for a predefined period of time (e.g., 3 months) that could start after and/or during a given customer survey poll period (which will be discussed in further detail herein).
Consumer intention database 118 may include one or more databases configured for storing consumer intention information obtained from consumers or cardholders via their responses to survey questions. For example, all of the cardholder survey question responses from a given survey period (e.g., a three month period that started in January and ended in April of a particular year) may be stored for analysis and processing to predict a particular consumer's purchase intention(s). In accordance with described embodiments, any particular consumer or cardholder survey poll may be provided to the cardholder in a linear fashion, meaning that the consumer survey poll questions may be presented in piecemeal fashion over time. For example, each time a particular cardholder performs a purchase transaction over the course of a specific two month period at a particular merchant (either at the merchant's retail store or online at a merchant website), that cardholder is presented with one to three survey questions at a time, wherein the entire consumer survey poll may consist of a total of twenty-five survey questions, for example. In this manner, the cardholder is not overburdened or overwhelmed during any one particular purchase transaction by being asked to respond to a large number of survey questions. As explained herein, some of the consumer survey questions may be designed to gauge the likelihood that a particular cardholder will purchase a particular type of product or service, while other types of consumer survey questions may be included that do not directly pertain to any products or services. For example, consumer survey questions could include questions pertaining to social issues, politic issues, and/or religious beliefs.
Instead of presenting a brief consumer survey to a cardholder at a merchant's POS device, consumer survey poll questions for collecting data related to consumer purchase intentions may be transmitted for presentation on a display screen of the consumer's payment-enabled mobile device, or as an Internet or web-based questionnaire or survey at a merchant's website, or as a printed form questionnaire or survey that may be provided to the cardholder by a cashier or other manner, or by any other technique that may be used to obtain the cardholder's responses to survey questions in the course of a purchase transaction. In some embodiments, participation in such brief consumer survey polls may be by consumers who have opted-in or otherwise chosen to participate to have their cardholder purchase transaction data and survey responses used to model consumer behavior (for example, by the cardholder completing a permission form at their issuer financial institution, which may be required in some jurisdictions in order to comply with consumer privacy regulations, for example).
Referring again to
Demographic database 122 may include one or more databases configured to store supplemental consumer information associated with each consumer's payment card account number that are contained in the purchase transaction reports in the purchase transaction database 116. The supplemental information may include data that is specific to each consumer or cardholder, including information such as demographic information (age and/or age groups), a residential address, and a ZIP code. In some embodiments, the demographic information database 122 may also include consumer information obtained from external sources. For example, the consumer information processor 112 of
The consumer profile database 124 may include one or more databases that are configured to store consumer profile data. For example, consumer profile data may include data fields corresponding to conventional consumer profiling attributes and/or characteristics (for example, demographic and gender attributes). In some embodiments, the consumer profile database 124 may also include an intention-action model score that may be determined or generated by the consumer information processor 112, for example. Such an intention-action model score may be indicative of whether or not a particular consumer or cardholder is likely to purchase a particular good or service within a particular period of time (for example, within the next six months) based on previously indicated intent data obtained from that cardholder via responses to one or more of the consumer survey poll questions. In general, predictive scores may be utilized as part of the consumer profile data. For example, a consumer's FICO score, which is a measure of a consumer's creditworthiness and thus commonly used by financial institutions such as issuers of payment card accounts, may be included as part of the consumer profile data.
The consumer survey database 126 may include one or more databases configured for storing consumer survey polls and/or consumer survey questions that have been developed to obtain consumer intention information. As mentioned earlier, a particular consumer survey poll may be composed of multiple questions with a small portion being presented to a consumer or cardholder during a particular transaction, wherein all of the questions are presented over time. For example, a particular in-depth consumer survey poll may include thirty (30) questions or more, but one or more cardholders would only be presented with two or three of the survey questions at a time (during purchase transactions) over a predetermined period of time, such as a three-month period. The survey questions may be generated by the consumer information processor 112 based on input from the client processor 130 (which is associated with an entity desiring to obtain consumer intention information regarding one or more products or services). Alternately, the consumer survey questions and/or consumer survey polls may be provided by one or more entities to the consumer information processor 112 for storage in the consumer survey database 126, and then those survey questions used to conduct consumer surveys of cardholders during purchase transactions. In addition, in some implementations the consumer survey questions may be updated dynamically and/or automatically as a particular cardholder responds to one or more of the survey questions of a particular consumer survey poll. For example, if a cardholder responds to one or more political questions in a particular manner, for example by designating himself or herself to be a registered Democrat and a voter, then follow-up consumer survey questions directed to or associated with that political party (and/or to or with voters in general) may be selected for future presentation to the cardholder while other survey questions are discarded. Thus, a particular consumer survey poll may be structured in such a manner to present certain survey questions that depend upon responses received from a particular cardholder.
The consumer incentives database 128 may include one or more databases configured for storing consumer incentives such as discount offers, cash-back offers, rebate offers, coupon offers, loyalty point offers, frequent flier mileage point offers, and the like for presentation to cardholders in return for answering consumer survey poll questions. In some implementations, the consumer incentives database 128 may be populated with incentive offers from one or more entities, such as merchants or manufacturers, who wish to obtain consumer intention information regarding one or more products or services. Such incentives may be selectable by the consumer information processor 112 during a purchase transaction depending on the context of a particular purchase transaction and then presented to the cardholder. For example, during the course of a purchase transaction at a pet supply store, a cardholder may be presented with a discount and/or a coupon offer for pet food that can be displayed on a display screen of a card reader associated with the POS device to the cardholder in exchange for responding to the consumer survey questions. In some implementations, the process may include presenting two or more incentive offers to a consumer or cardholder, wherein the consumer can select one if he or she agrees to answer consumer survey questions.
Referring again to
In some embodiments, the system 100 of
Referring again to
In some embodiments, the consumer survey questions may be designed to inquire as to the degree to which a queried consumer intends to purchase a particular product by utilizing a scaling system (for example, by using a scale ranging from 1 to 5). Each number value of the scale may represent an intensity of the likelihood that the consumer believes that he or she will ultimately purchase the product. For example, selecting the value of “5” may indicate that the consumer strongly believes that he or she will purchase a particular product within two months (such as a microwave oven in the example explained above with regard to
In some embodiments, as mentioned above the consumer survey questions may be related to issues other than products or services. For example, consumer survey questions of a particular consumer survey poll may be related to social and/or political issues that may be important to particular cardholders and/or to the entity that is sponsoring the consumer survey poll. Thus, consumer survey questions may include questions related to political candidates, political parties, voting, political issues, government issues, social issues, community issues, religious issues and the like. In some cases, one or more of such consumer survey questions may utilize a scale to gauge the amount of the consumer's interest in any particular issue as described above.
However, if in step 306 the cardholder agrees to participate in the brief consumer survey, then one or more survey questions are transmitted 310 to a card reader device and displayed on a display screen or otherwise presented to the cardholder. It should be understood that the consumer survey questions may be presented to the consumer in any manner feasible, such as on a display screen of a cardholder's payment-enabled mobile device, or on a display screen of the cardholder's personal computer, and in some embodiments may be orally read to the consumer by store personnel (who may also enter the responses from a consumer). In some implementations, the consumer survey questions may be audibly presented to a consumer, for example by utilizing a speaker or speakers on a consumer's mobile device or speakers associated with other electronic devices.
Referring again to
It should be understood that the process illustrated by the flowchart of
The computer processor 402 may constitute one or more conventional processors. Processor 402 operates to execute processor-executable steps, contained in program instructions described herein, so as to control the consumer information computer 400 to provide desired functionality.
Communication component 404 may be used to facilitate communication with, for example, other devices (such as for receiving data from one or more client computers associated with entities desiring to obtain consumer purchasing behavior predictions) by engaging, for example, in data communications over conventional computer-to-computer data networks. Such data communications may be in digital form and/or in analog form.
Input device 406 may comprise one or more of any type of peripheral device typically used to input data into a computer. For example, the input device 406 may include a keyboard and a mouse and/or a touchpad that may be used, for example, by a systems engineer or other personnel authorized to, for example, perform consumer information computer system maintenance or other task. The output device 408 may comprise, for example, a display and/or a printer.
Storage device 410 may comprise any appropriate information storage device, including combinations of magnetic storage devices (e.g., magnetic tape and hard disk drives), optical storage devices such as CDs and/or DVDs, and/or semiconductor memory devices such as Random Access Memory (RAM) devices and Read Only Memory (ROM) devices, as well as flash memory devices. Any one or more of the listed storage devices may be referred to as a “memory”, “storage”, “non-transitory computer readable media”, or a “storage medium”.
Storage device 410 stores one or more programs or applications or modules for controlling processor 402. The programs or applications or modules comprise program instructions that contain processor-executable process steps of the consumer information computer 400, including, in some cases, process steps that constitute processes provided in accordance with principles of the processes presented herein.
The programs may include a cardholder survey participation module 412 that manages a process by which consumers are queried regarding their willingness to participate in a consumer survey poll, and that may also operate to store the consumer responses to survey questions. In addition, the storage device 410 may include a consumer survey poll module 414 that manages a process by which consumer survey polls are developed (or obtained from one or more entities) and then utilized, including determining the total number of survey questions of a particular survey poll and how many survey questions to be transmitted to a cardholder during any particular purchase transaction. Also included may be a consumer incentives module 416 that manages a process whereby a cardholder is offered one or more incentives for participating in a brief consumer survey, and that provides the cardholder with the incentive(s) after the responses are received. A consumer survey response analysis and reporting module 418 may also be included, which may be configured to analyze the consumer responses and generate one or more predictions concerning the purchasing behavior of one or more particular cardholders and report the predicted purchasing behavior to one or more entities (such as a merchant and/or a product manufacturer and/or a service provider).
In addition, the storage device 410 may include a purchase transaction database 420, a consumer intention database 422, a historical database 424, a demographic database 426, a consumer profile database 428, and one or more databases 430 that are maintained by the consumer information computer 400 on the storage device 410.
The application programs of the consumer information computer 400, as described above, may be combined in some embodiments, as convenient, into one, two or more application programs or program modules. Moreover, the storage device 410 may store other programs or applications or modules, such as one or more operating systems, device drivers, database management software, web hosting software, and the like.
Accordingly, by utilizing the apparatus, systems and processes presented herein, an entity such as a merchant and/or product manufacturer and/or service provider can be provided with the opportunity to discern future cardholder or consumer purchasing behavior and may utilize such information to react to the purchasing intentions and/or the preferences of the consumers and thus to provide a superior level of service. Furthermore, in some embodiments, through participation in the processes described herein (by responding to consumer survey questions), consumers have the opportunity to receive personalized commercials for consideration and/or to obtain customized or targeted incentive offers such as discounts and/or coupons from merchants in real-time that are highly relevant to the consumer and that may be based on the consumers' needs.
In the particular example, in the field of women's apparel (AAW), responses to consumer survey questions can provide important and valuable information concerning customers' opinions toward women's clothing products. Traditional survey methodology focuses on women's intention opinions, which may not match their actual actions (purchasing behavior), and thus the present systems and methods provide a hard link between a woman's survey question responses and their actual purchase actions. In particular, women's clothing designers can greatly benefit from knowing their customers' opinions concerning current women's clothing fashion and design, as well as the impact of the opinions on actual shopping selections (made at a later date). Thus, the present simple, low cost, accurate and efficient customer survey process may be tuned to collect customer survey responses from female cardholders pertaining to the women's apparel industry, store such survey data, and then automatically perform intention-action processing and advanced statistical analyses to predict cardholders women's apparel purchasing behavior. Such predictions of customer needs can significantly improve women's apparel marketing strategies, including advertising campaigns, new product development, and existing product management.
As used herein and in the appended claims, the terms “initiating a transaction” and/or “during a purchase transaction” includes a proximity payment device such as a payment-enabled mobile telephone or other contactless payment device communicating with a reader device that may be associated with a POS terminal. The terms “initiating a transaction” and/or “during a purchase transaction” can also include a payment-enabled mobile device communicating with a website to transmit and receive data so as to enter into on-line purchasing transactions or payment transactions.
The above descriptions and illustrations of processes herein should not be considered to imply a fixed order for performing the process steps. Rather, the process steps may be performed in any order that is practicable, including simultaneous performance of at least some steps.
Although the present invention has been described in connection with specific exemplary embodiments, it should be understood that various changes, substitutions, and alterations apparent to those skilled in the art can be made to the disclosed embodiments without departing from the spirit and scope of the invention as set forth in the appended claims.
