But this reflects only the half of the story as companies like buzd have played the role of an innovative analytics partner helping them to respond to the challenges. For instance, buzd provided ANF, a bricks and mortar business with a rich set of tools that helped them to put the old social feel back into the shopping experience. Buzd’s sophisticated applications and social media tools, enable customers to interact directly and help retailers change product lines and store layouts, change opening hours, and deliver customized information back to the customers. Add to this, the buzd dash board which is a constantly evolving ecosystem designed to display various interpretations of the raw data collected by the sensors makes building up real-time results much easier for the company. Buzd Global Director of Marketing, Glenn Wei Land highlighted the marketing power of Retail Analytics; “With our reporting dash board, marketers can drive pre-purchase, in-store and post purchase campaigns on an individual basis with total accountability - ROI planning, execution and reporting in real-time!”

Sarah Garvey State Manager for the ANF WA worked closely with buzd in the trial and commented: “Working with ANF innovation partner buzd and three established WA news agencies, the trial focused on what collectively was identified as the three key retail challenges – collecting relevant customer data, distilling the data using real time analytics to identify opportunities and finally, connecting with the customers to build sales. Outstanding analytical results were experienced revealing major points of vital value to agents and the ANF.”

Buzd’s team of developers has an intimate understanding of the construction of Wi-Fi packets which allows them to develop the required algorithms to ensure the most accurate results.

Buzd also addresses a far wider range of industries owing to its rapid and agile development processes. Its ability to provide real-time information to people in queues at sporting events is one of them. For example, in stadiums, the long queues at food and beverage outlets can force a customer to give up waiting in the current queue, resulting in huge revenue losses. Buzd helps by displaying queue lengths on video screens at each outlet and encouraging patrons to go to another outlet with a smaller queue and make a purchase worth millions of dollars per year to food and beverage resellers. "Our philosophy is to educate our customers on how to utilise their unique data to make fact-based business decisions. Putting the tools in their hands to improve areas such as staff management, store layout, marketing - all of which can increase bottom line profitability," Stuart comments, a sentiment agreed with by Jacques Bland In, CEO at BuzD.

Promoting the Utilization and Application of the Data

Buzd’s team of developers has an intimate understanding of the construction of Wi-Fi packets which allows them to develop the required algorithms to ensure the most accurate results. Combining technical capabilities with backgrounds in marketing, retail and large commercial organizations, the company always finds a way to ensure that its data virtualization solutions provided through the dashboard are both meaningful and easy to understand. Stuart entails, “As far as how we have motivated retailers to both use and leverage our analytics I believe that it is a result of our core philosophy of education customers around the utilization and application of the data we provide as opposed to simply selling them a product and moving on to the next prospect as we have seen happen all too often by other providers.”

Jacques Bland In, President and CEO, buzd adds, “We don’t walk in and tell prospects how great we are or that we are the golden sauce that will fix all of their woes. If we cannot uncover how we can add value to a prospects business we will politely walk away letting them know that we don’t feel we can add sufficient value to their particular business.” However, this only occurs in rare cases where the prospect either does not really understand their marketer has no real desire to accept advice from an external source.

With over 25 technology projects on this calendar year and another 40 or so planned for next calendar year, buzd is quickly changing the analytics landscape. Despite the success of its tools and systems, the company has specifically developed and deployed sensors powered with solar energy and built-in SIM cards for connectivity. Another current field test involves integrating sensors with mobile digital billboards on top of vehicles and queue counters sending data directly into taxi dispatch systems and dashboard job displays. Outside of the technology buzd is building a team of industry specialists who provide customer consulting services that examine collected data and provide advice on how and where the data can have a positive impact on their business. The company wants to bring the connected and social experience back to physical stores, by helping organisations understand and improve the experience of their customers. Stuart in his concluding lines emphasized the importance of real-time big data, “Over the past few years we have been able to influence many vendors to include capabilities that we can leverage in order to provide greater levels of accuracy and performance in the areas of device detection and collection of data allowing buzd to deliver a level of analytics not common in the industry.”