Presence Orb: How this company is Reinventing the Retail Store Experience

Focusing on the customer experience


The key to remaining relevant for retailers is to provide a unique shopping experience tailored for an individual consumer. One way brick and mortar retailers can deliver this experience is by employing in-store analytics to gain insights into their customers’ behaviors and using that knowledge to engage their customers as they shop. The use of in-store analytics is a revolution in both how retailers understand their customers and how they communicate with them.

Presence Orb is an analytics software platform collects and analyzes shopper behavior data, providing retailers with insight to improve the shopper experience real time. Tracking customer behavior enables retailers better serve the customer and drive sales in stores.

At a Glance

Company –  Presence Orb Inc

Founder & CEO – Thomas Sheppard

Location – San Diego

With its headquarters in the London, the company entity in the US is Presence Orb Inc. Founded in 2013, the company has expanded operations in over 54 countries processing over 4 billion data points daily.

Thomas Sheppard, Founder & CEO of Presence Orb

Thomas Sheppard, Founder & CEO of Presence Orb in a detailed conversation with The Clairemont Times, talks about how the Presence Orb app can be used to enhance communication between retailers and shoppers. 

What is Presence Orb?

Presence Orb bridges the gap between online and offline visitor behavior insight. By understanding how visitors interact with your spaces, providing guest Wifi to gain insight into demographic-based behavior, and creating hyper-targeted, real-time, location-based marketing opportunities, our clients are able to:

– Improve visitor experience and increase brand loyalty

– Optimise operations for better product-market fit

– Accurately evaluate campaigns and measure success

– Predict customer behaviour with up to 94% accuracy

Using Analytics to Improve the In-store Experience

A robust venue analytics platform, Presence Orb allows clients in industries such as retail, hospitality, leisure, property management and transport networks to track how customers and staff use their commercial space. This data is analysed to provide actionable business intelligence and real-time, location-based marketing communications opportunities.

We track customers using in-venue wifi networks and customer mobile phones. Passive tracking means customers do not need to engage with any websites or apps in order to be tracked, ensuring maximised data accuracy. If current wifi networks are compatible, there is no additional hardware required; no messy installations or capital expenditure.

Presence Orb brings business intelligence to all departments and teams within your organisation; from operations to to strategy planning, marketing and beyond! Capture metrics KPI metrics, gain deep insight into how different types of visitors interact with your venues and communicate in real-time to improve customer experience, evaluate initiatives and boost brand loyalty.

In addition to the data captured, import third party data such as sales figures and staffing levels, or open source data such as weather and transport to further enrich insight. Use predictive analytics to forecast customer behavior with up to 94% accuracy.

What problem does Presence Orb solve?

With up to 80% of the population owning a smartphone, consumers now expect fast, free and user-friendly guest Wifi wherever they go. Presence Orb allows business owners in retail, hospitality and more to go above and beyond on guest WiFi to delight their customers.

Clients can enhance customer experience with branded login; customised, location-specific content and seamless WiFi login every time, at any of their venues.
Manage every step of your visitors’ experience for maximum customer satisfaction with our simple, web-based tool – build beautiful, branded splash pages; display targeted advertising; drive social media followers and more!

Once visitors connect to the guest WiFi, Presence Orb allows businesses to target customers with real-time, location based marketing campaigns via email, SMS, push notifications and more. WiFi analytics allows venue owners to measure their real-world spaces with the same level of detail as websites are analysed with tools such as Google Analytics – perfect for evaluating new offers and strategies.

How the app works for a customer?

If, for example, a business operating 3 boutique coffee shops was to sign up to Presence Orb, they first of all would need an “Orb” (wireless access point) in each location. This is simply a small box that plugs into the back of their existing WiFi router. Once these are plugged in, the coffee shop owner will log in online to create their branded Guest Wifi login page.

Customers will then use this branded page to log in, allowing the client to advertise relevant offers or promotions on that page, and capture visitors’ contact information. When visitors log in, they can be directed to the client website, social media account or any other online page. With their contact information, clients are able to engage consumers such as emailing all first time visitors asking them to leave a review on TripAdvisor, or reaching out to all regular customers via SMS about a new loyalty programme.

The business owner can also monitor the impact of any marketing campaigns by analysing things such as street traffic, individual visitors, street-to-store conversion rate, average linger time, new vs. returning visitors, average time between visits and more. Add as many users as you like and create custom reports that can be automatically emailed to the team on a regular basis.

Future Outlook

As a business, Presence Orb aims to bridge the gap between the online and offline customer experience.

Involved in a number of proofs of deployments internationally, we are working with some very exciting businesses and initiatives to make this happen. From analysing differences in consumer behavior between continents, to find out how consumers interact in a venue after they’ve visited the brand website, to help consumers make wine choices using artificial intelligence, and more!

Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs

Jade Edinburgh, Head of Partnerships, Presence Orb –  “Firstly, make sure there’s actually a real problem you’re solving, and not coming up with the best invention that nobody ever asked for! Once you know there’s a need for your solution, tailor it as closely as possible to suit your target demographic and how they want to interact with your solution. Keep evaluating your target market and never stop improving to move closely towards the holy grail of product-market fit”

How to connect

Website – http://www.presenceorb.com
Email – contactus@presenceorb.com

LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/presenceorbtom/
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/presenceorb/

Twitter – http://www.twitter.com/PresenceOrb

If you would like to have your startup featured please send an email to Tanya@ClairemontTimes.com