Use Case: A Grocery Trip
I made a system that announces you as you walk through the door. I call it Announcr.
It doesn’t just happen automatically as you move around, you choose to do it. Announcr uses location in a couple different ways. Let me explain!
Let’s say you’re going to do your weekly grocery shopping. A normal, mundane chore. You’re going to go somewhere and spend a couple hundred bucks, an hour or two of your time, and then drag it all in and put it all away. However, this time you’re going to use Announcr to enhance the experience.
You choose the grocery store in the Announcr app. You see a list of coupons for the day based on your previous shopping experiences. The store gets notified you’re coming, and how far away you are when you start. If they are into advanced customer experience, they put together a welcome basket personalized for you.
You come within 200’ of the store and stop moving. This is “outside arrival”. The store is notified. In the app, you can now choose to Announce yourself, and set the timer before it happens. This gives you time to walk up to the front entrance. Or this is one of the fancy stores and it knows when you’re close enough to the door to trigger the announcement.
You walk through the door. The “inside arrival” event is triggered. There are speakers right near the entrance. Trumpets blare, and everyone hears “Laaaadies and Gentlemen!! Please welcome Dave to our fine store. He comes just about every week, and is a software engineer from Hillsborough, New Hampshire”
People turn and smile and laugh, some shout out “Hey Dave!” and you laugh, bow, wave and smile awkwardly. The 5-10 people who heard the announcement have their moods lifted in the middle of their own mundane chores. A nice little piece of shared social entertainment. Some of them go download Announcr so they can have that special treatment too.
You go do your shopping, cash out, and walk out. You get to your car and pull up the Announcr app again. You’re gonna make a quick pit stop at Cumberland Farms, a convenience store on the way home. You arrive at Cumbie’s and walk in. The speakers over the door say “Dave’s here!” and the clerk looks over and says “Hey Dave”. You’ve walked into this store every day for the last 10 years and they didn’t know or use your name until now. It feels good to be welcome by name.
Back in your car, time to head home before the ice cream melts. it’s started to rain heavy. You try to let your family know you’re on the way home but no one is picking up their phones and they’re leaving you unread in the text messages. You pick up the app again, and select Home Base. Inside your house, your speakers announce that you’re on the way home and how far away you are. You drive back home and pull into the driveway. You’re 100’ away and stabilized location, so it triggers an “outside arrival” message. The speakers in the house announce that you’ve arrived. The app then brings up the Announce screen and you enter a custom message “Please come help with the groceries” and hit “Announce Me Now”. The location is your own home and so even though it’s a custom message, it’s free.
A few seconds later, that message is played inside the house and your kids come out to help bring in the groceries. You didn’t even have to ask! Somehow it was easier to obey an authoritarian British male voice telling them to go outside in the rain and help. There was no one to argue with about it!
You smile as the kids each grab a few bags and head to the front door. You hit the button “Announce Me in 30 seconds” and then you walk up the stairs and into your house. The speakers declare “Welcome back home, Daddy!” and then plays a few seconds of your favorite song. People were arguing and fighting while you were out, and this lifts the mood up and breaks the ice.
An hour later, you’re relaxing, the groceries are all put away. You get a notification on your phone that the grocery store appreciated seeing you today and asks you for feedback on your visit. You hit the notification and are brought to a survey asking if things were clean, if you found what you needed, etc. You give them some feedback and say you did find everything but it cost you more than you thought it would for a quick trip out. You’ve done this a couple times now and are part of a “Customer MVP” group.
Suddenly your speakers play a soft flowery melody. For all you know, a fairy godmother is about to burst into the living room! “Grandma is on the way, she’s 12 miles away”. You call out to the kids “KIDS! Time to clean up, Grandma’s coming!”
So you can see that with an app, some connected speakers, and several events, we can put together all kinds of different scenarios and workflows for people and businesses to use. We can use it to make people feel special, deliver useful information, lift moods, make friends out of strangers, and even get some help in the house.