Company for provision of services, Research and Development DOO, NIŠ

This project aims to revolutionize the way in which small businesses are engaging customers in smart cities, by exploiting the advantages of combining real-time location-based services (including those provided by smart cities) and customer loyalty programs. The business idea is motivated by the drawback of traditional punch cards, like “buy 10, get one free” programs for small businesses and their need to introduce more incentives for customer loyalty. We argue that by introducing our approach small businesses will be able to provide more flexible and personalized customer loyalty programs, which overcome the most critical problems in existing approaches.

Our approach postulates on the idea of customer loyalty through engaging with a business/merchant in a more sustainable way than only with reward points for each purchase. We argue that especially in smart cities there are much more possibilities to engage customers in the local businesses. Indeed, current research about customer psychology indicates that customers like to feel “important” for a merchant not only because of the purchase but also due to “influence” on the business through their opinion, social networking, or even (active) lifestyle. It means that an engaged customer should be motivated to identify with the business in different, daily life, situations she/he is involved in. Using Smart city infrastructure it will be possible to connect this information with the available (open) data relevant for local businesses. Consequently, the customer should be rewarded for all such activities, usually through some kind of discount coupons or reward points. On the other hand, the business should be able to gather new customers for their loyalty programs in an easy way. Finally, we assume that city administration and NGOs and other associations (esp. citizens-driven) will be interested in using the platform for better engaging in different public campaigns that are part of the Participatory Sensing initiatives.

The Team

Dr. Nenad Stojanovic – Head of Research, BSc (1994) – Faculty of Electronic Engineering Nis, MSc (1998) – Faculty of Electronic Engineering Nis, PhD (2005) – University of Karlsruhe
(now KIT) Germany, very experienced project manager.
Aleksandar Stojanovic, Innovation Manager – lean startups, marketing.
Boban Stajic, Software Engineer – mobile solutions, real-time applications.
Dusan Kostic, Software Engineer – android developer.
Jovica Zlatanovic, Software Engineer – security.