Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tom Bianculli, Vice President of Technology Office at Zebra Technologies (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a few customer use cases that are significant and are exhibiting interesting trends through your work with these customers?

Tom Bianculli: Retail, I mentioned, is a significant part of our business. There’s no secret about what’s going on there with regard to e-commerce competition and the desire to create online analytics for the offline world. We want to enable them to get the same insights that an online retailer has like what products I’m looking at, what products I’m hovering over, and what have I removed from my basket.

The brick-and-mortar companies have no visibility into that data. They don’t necessarily know who is in their store. If you put something in your physical shopping cart, the retailer doesn’t know that. If you abandon your shopping cart, very often, they don’t know it. What store you came from, which is the equivalent of knowing what website you came from previously is also not known.

We’re seeing the opportunity with brick-and-mortar retailers today to instrument their stores with sensing capabilities. A case study I can talk to you about is Macy’s where we’ve deployed something we call Impact. These are low-energy Bluetooth beacons that we place around the store. There’s an application that runs on the shopper’s mobile phone. Then through the wireless LAN network, we can detect the presence of the device. We use the wireless LAN network to detect the presence of the customer when they pull into the parking lot.

We’re able to onboard them onto the wireless network when they get to the store. Then we use these low-energy Bluetooth beacons to act as location waypoints. We can track where the shoppers are as they move through their shopping journey and then provide the right engagements for the shoppers based on their needs or what’s in their basket. It could be an electronic offer down to their phone. It could be as simple as somebody standing in front of a product and just dwelling. Our sensors can detect that they’re dwelling and that sends off a message to dispatch store staff to go by the side of that individual and help them make a purchasing decision or get them the information they need.

Sramana Mitra: When did you roll this out at Macy’s?

Tom Bianculli: The announcement went out just before 2015 Black Friday – November 2015.

Sramana Mitra: Do you have metrics on what is the usage level of this and what it is doing to Macy’s?

Tom Bianculli: Macy’s is not sharing all of that with us for obvious reasons, but we went through a number of trial periods with them before they decided to deploy and without getting into specific numbers, their basket size went up.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tom Bianculli, Vice President of Technology Office at Zebra Technologies
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