The company, which recently raised $20-million, has been working on using AI to understand the demographics, footfall and conversations within a retail store to give these stores a helping hand in an era where online players are aggressively expanding their operations.
By using these solutions, stores can now attempt to do targeted advertising, produce heat maps, analyse conversations and build unique customer profiles. Capillary is piloting these solutions with an initial few customers. For Capillary, this is opening up a new suite of products other than its existing omnichannel customer engagement products. “The only way to expand across Asia is to build a multiproduct play. We said, let us start setting up teams with things we want to dabble with,” said Aneesh Reddy, CEO, Capillary Technologies.
The company released its footfall counter in October last year and has since then been growing its product list. Under the AI suite, the company is dabbling with a product called ‘VisitorMetrix Plus’ which measures footfall trend, conversion, visitor demographics and visitor fashion profiling and another product called ‘Store Sense’ that looks at providing insights into each customer’s behaviour pattern in a store and his interactions with the store staff to understand his requirements, category preferences and propensity to purchase.
“It gives a sense of what is happening in your store — have a few cameras, a couple of mikes. If you were looking to buy a black shirt on an online platform, you will search for ablack shirt,” said Reddy. “Same thing in an offline store, you will tell the store guy that you want a black shirt. The online store knows if you finally bought that shirt. But, in the offline world, for the guy in the head office, it is very hard.”
To put this in perspective, online platforms like Flipkart and Amazon use customer data and insights gleaned from their shopping to build a personalised experience. Each click, purchase, search, comment is recorded and analysed to understand an individual. To create a similar offline environment, Capillary is looking at installing mikes, cameras and sensors at select locations to ‘catch’ conversations and understand a customer better. These ‘voices’ can then be analysed in the back-end.