A major Russian convenience store chain, Ulybka Radugi, is now running a trial of facial recognition to choose digital in-store ads to be displayed and POS coupons to be offered. But as more chains start to seriously investigate the facial recognition potential, some of the fundamental CRM biometric assumptions are being challenged. Such activities need not end with the same channel where they began. Once a shopper is identified in-store and is matched with a CRM profile—or they are identified anonymously in-store and a purchase profile of this unknown-person-with-this-specific-face is slowly built—that information can theoretically be married to data from that person's desktop-shopping e-commerce efforts or their tablet/smartphone's m-commerce efforts.
The question, then, is whether it has to start in-store. What if this hypothetical chain pushes some attractive incentives to get lots of customers and prospects to download its free mobile app? And buried in the terms and conditions is the right for the app to monitor images? The next selfie or Snapchat that the shopper sends is captured and the facial data points are noted. Here's where it gets even freakier. Once the mobile app has identified the face of the shopper—and has linked it to whatever mobile shopper that customer has done—it can tell the in-store camera databases what to look for. When that shopper walks in, it can connect the mobile activity with any observed in-store activity.