First Insight Announces New Insight Customer Experience (iCX) Platform

First Insight, Inc., the world’s leading technology company transforming how retailers and brands make product investment, pricing and marketing decisions, today announced the launch of its next-generation customer experience platform, iCX. The new capabilities build on First Insight’s industry-leading product testing solution to deliver a seamless, tailored, rewarding experience to consumers through customized engagements, flexible segmentation capabilities, personalized offers and more. The new platform is fast and combines enhanced customer insights with product-level analytics to enable companies to increase speed to market and deliver assortments that are truly customer-driven.

“For the last 12 years, First Insight has helped hundreds of retailers and brands use voice-of-the-customer data and predictive analytics to improve their operations – from product design to buying to pricing,” said Greg Petro, CEO of First Insight. “With the new iCX platform, we are excited to deliver an enhanced customer experience that is more engaging and personalized, leading to increased loyalty and conversions. The new platform also incorporates some of the latest technologies such as image recognition and survey branching, allowing our retail partners to derive even more value from the First Insight solution.”

“At Crocs, we are eager to start using this new customer experience platform to dig deeper into the “why” behind customer behavior - why customers like (or don’t like) a product, or why they will pay more,” said Michael Pao, Vice President of Product Management at Crocs. “This qualitative data is just as important as the quantitative data and will help Crocs to create truly customer-driven assortments. We believe that the First Insight cannibalization analysis also will enable Crocs to leverage the data on complementarity of items to get more styles placed with retailers.”

First Insight’s new iCX platform is simple and easy to use and includes a complete self-service model. iCX delivers the following new capabilities:

Enhanced consumer engagement tools: First Insight has made the consumer engagement aspect of the digital-testing process more exciting and seamless, carrying the look and feel of the retailer or brand through the interface and streamlining the segmentation process. The solution also enables the use of 3D virtual prototypes and provides the ability to present rotation and movement, making the engagement more immersive. These capabilities result in higher consumer response rates and enable retailers and brands to eliminate physical samples when performing digital testing, both of which drive speed and create dramatic cost savings.

Tailored insight customer experience (iCX) through survey branching: Thanks to new survey technology, retailers and brands can more accurately identify and segment consumers and deliver a more customized, personalized experience. Through conditional branching, also known as skip logic or survey branching, question responses can be used to specify relevant follow-up questions and also to direct consumers to the best or most relevant insight based on their interests. These capabilities enable retailers and brands to gain more detailed insights from target segments, including new customer groups and competing retailers’ or brands’ customers.

Personalized rewards through single-use coupon codes: Some retailers and brands incentivize consumers to provide input on new products by offering them a discount on their next purchase, often generating incremental sales. Consumers can now receive an individualized, single-use coupon code to apply to their purchase, a more personalized offer that enables retailers and brands to link the incentive to the specific consumer providing the input. This results in a higher level of consumer engagement and loyalty as well as higher conversion rates, while reducing overall promotion costs.

Cannibalization and incrementality analysis: Retailers and brands have long relied on First Insight’s predictive preseason data on new styles to inform their product investment decisions. With cannibalization and incrementality analysis, First Insight enables merchants to create optimized assortments by considering the crossover effects of items within the assortment tested. Consumer input is gathered using a technique that simulates the actual shopping and purchase decision processes. The results presentation matches the way merchants evaluate a tested assortment and the way they make selection, pricing, buying and marketing decisions. Results are available in 24-48 hours, or even faster, helping retailers and brands streamline and accelerate their product line decision process.

Image recognition: From the initial launch of its solution set over a decade ago, First Insight has focused on the visual experience – from capturing feedback visually from customers to delivering visual output to merchants and product designers. With iCX, First Insight now incorporates the latest image recognition technology, making the solution easier for retailers and brands to use and implement. iCX applies this technology to tracking images from the initial test to in-market launch, allowing unprecedented scale and making it easier, faster and more seamless for companies to quantify the ROI of the solution.

Geographic expansion: Building on its ability to engage consumers quickly across multiple countries and languages, First Insight has expanded its geographic and language coverage. First Insight supports its ever-expanding customer base, as well as its existing retail and brand partners as they enter into new geographies, by continuing to add the ability to test with consumers in new regions. Three new language-currency combinations, including one for the Russian market, are now available, bringing the total number of locales covered to over 35.

About First Insight, Inc.

First Insight is the world’s leading customer-centric merchandising platform that empowers retailers and brands to incorporate the Voice of the Customer into the design, pricing, planning and marketing of new products. Through the use of online consumer engagement, the First Insight solution gathers real-time consumer data and applies predictive analytic models to create actionable insights, which drive measurable value. Retailers, manufacturers and brands use the First Insight solution to design, select, price, plan and market the most profitable new products for reduced markdown rates and improved sales, margins and inventory turnover. Customers include some of world’s leading vertically integrated brands, sporting goods companies, department stores, mass merchant retailers and wholesalers. For further information, please visit www.firstinsight.com.

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