Statistics are great. They sound boring, but when it comes to making real business decisions, they’re one of the most useful tools available today. That is, if you have a website. If you have a brick-and-mortar store, it’s nearly impossible to identify true statistics on customer use, retention rate, etc. as most methods available are extremely time-intensize, expensive, or inaccurate.
Enter Euclid Elements. Their new technology uses sensors placed strategically throughout a store to track customer’s movements, location, dwelling time, etc. using their smartphone. When the smartphone reaches out for a WiFi ping, the sensor anonymizes and tracks the phone the whole time it’s in the store.
Now, the glaring weakness here is that smartphone adoption still hasn’t passed 50% yet (although it’s slated to by the end of the year), so you’ll still be missing a significant portion of your customers. but, if you ran an Apple store for instance, you’re likely to have a large portion of your customers carrying smartphones anyway and adoption rates are rising very, very fast.
The potential of such a technology is absolutely huge. Imagine being able to track the exact time spent in the store, which items were looked at the most, customer loyalty, conversion rates, etc. all with very unobtrusive technology. We can’t wait to see it played out in “real life”.