How Impekable’s CNECT platform designs helped Thin Film lower barriers to entry and improve results for its near-field communication (NFC) silicon chip customers.
Services
UX Design
Visual Design
Product Design
A manufacturer of Near-Field Communication (NFC) chips, Thin Film Electronics ASA — now Ensurge Micropower ASA — saw an opportunity to transform the transactional nature of its business by enabling clients to deepen their relationships with retail customers through its silicon chip technology.
Imagine a manufacturer of consumer packaged goods (CPG). Because their products are sold to customers through retail channels, it is the retailers — not the product owners — who ultimately have the relationship with the customer.
Recognizing that this dynamic leaves manufacturers at a disadvantage, Thin Film aimed to help manufacturers gain market insight and deliver more tailored user experiences by integrating NFC chips into their packaging.
However, because Thin Film also realized that many of its manufacturing clients lacked extensive in-house IT capabilities, they enlisted Impekable’s help to design marketing and procurement platforms that would enable companies to launch NFC chip-driven campaigns quickly and easily.
Thin Film had their own in-house engineers to support the ultimate development of the CNECT platform. But they needed the expertise of an outside partner to fulfill the project’s UX design, visual design, and product design requirements.
In order to deliver designs that met the needs of Thin Film’s multiple stakeholders, our team began with a deep-dive into the company’s technology, customers, competitors, and unique value proposition.
These insights — along with ongoing collaboration with Thin Film’s team — enabled us to develop winning design concepts for multiple CNECT Cloud Platform properties.
One of the first platform components we imagined for Thin Film was a campaign builder that would allow marketers to create highly customized user experiences without needing to code.
For example, one specific functionality designed for the campaign builder was the ability to control multi-tap customer journeys. Specifically, customers’ first tap of a Thin Film NFC chip could be set to take them to one web page, while subsequent taps could direct them to additional pages.
Additional design work was committed to ensuring Thin Film’s customers could maximize the value of the data generated by their campaigns.
By analyzing and interpreting this tap data, companies were able to optimize future campaigns, influence R&D decisions, and develop stronger relationships with their end-user customers.
On the purchasing side, Impekable created an experience through which Thin Film’s customers could not just order NFC chips, but they could also pair batches of chips to their different product lines or SKUs.
For instance, if a customer ordered 100K NFC chips, Impekable’s mobile app and web dashboard designs allowed them to designate the first 20K chips to one product line, the next 50K chips to a second line, and the final 30K chips to the remaining line at the click of a button.
In total, Impekable designed six specific applications for Thin Film, all of which helped the company to lower the barriers to the adoption of its NFC chips. The applications were the Thin Film website, the CNECT Platform, the Experience Builder, the “Tap to Gift” Feature, the NFC Scanner, and the CNECT.io website.
Before the Thin Film discontinued the use of its CNECT Cloud Platform,
these six components supported several different use cases, including:
The use of two-state NFC chips on packaging enabled retail buyers to determine whether their items were legal or counterfeited.
Similarly, chips placed on the wrappers or rims of wine bottles, high-end spirits, and other specialty items helped customers ensure bottles hadn’t been tampered with.
By tapping NFC chips integrated into the items they’d purchased, consumers could be notified immediately if they won a giveaway or sweepstakes event.
Manufacturers gained valuable market insights based on the times at which consumers tapped their NFC chips, which contributed to new product development.
Though packaging could only be printed in one language, manufacturers could use NFC chips to deliver localized experiences wherever their products were sold.
Through the campaign builder, marketers could customize users’ experiences by programming Thin Film’s chips to display different information at various times of the day.
After Kilchoman Distillery, an award-winning single-malt Scotch whisky producer, replaced its conventional neck-tag booklets with NFC-enabled neck-tags from Thin Film, the company saw increased engagement over traditional digital marketing channels.
Further, the Distillery was able to utilize Thin Film’s NFC data to better understand the geographic reach of its products, its average ‘ship-to-shelf’ time, its iOS app engagement, and more.
“The results of our first campaign were quite promising, and we’re using that data to make the consumer experience even more compelling moving forward.” – Anthony Wills, Founder and Managing Director, Kilchoman Distillery
If you’re looking for a design or development partner who can help push the boundaries of your technology and services — and your users’ experiences within it — reach out to Impekable for more information on our cutting-edge services.
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