Investigating Augmented Reality Opportunities: Empowering Retail Service Agents With Augmented Reality

This thesis attempts to investigate of how AR can create a beneficial impact on consumers’ lives. The question of AR technology might be used to enhance the in-store shopping experience is investigated, since this has recently been challenged by the emergence and continued growth of online shopping. E-commerce has offered many retail innovations including personalizing information to individual customers. These advances have not been easy to bring to retail environments, which still make up the bulk of people’s shopping. Salespeople want to engage customers on a personal level, and they want to discover a customer’s interests in order to provide high quality, personalized service. They often struggle to understand a customer’s taste and needs, as personal taste is hard to communicate. Augmented reality offers an opportunity to deliver individualized information about customers to salespeople in order to help them personalize service. This thesis project explores opportunities for augmented reality technology to help salespeople to better understand and create personalized relationships with customers. I researched retail salespeople’s experiences to identify design opportunities. Based on the opportunities I identified, I propose an augmented reality platform with tools that can provide real-time, integrated information about customers to salespeople.