Tired of waiting in long lines at the grocery store or maneuvering through endless aisles to find the latest gadget at your electronics outlet? Application service provider Brickstream Corp. is trying to allay these common frustrations through the wonders of high tech.
The company, making its corporate and initial product launch, offers a suite of software and services designed to help retail stores, banks and packaged goods manufacturers, such as beverage or detergent companies, gain a better understanding of consumer behavior and how to respond to it.
"We are all familiar with how bad the shopping experience is for the consumer," says Amir Hudda, Brickstream founder, president and CEO. "Retailers have no idea what goes inside the walls of individual stores. Retailers are starting to understand it's no longer about product and prices; they need to focus on entire customer experience. They need information to understand customer relationships."
Of course, customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, which help companies better understand their customers, already are widely available. CRM has enjoyed significant adoption to date and is expected to grow to a $28 billion business by 2005.
Hudda says CRM has seen its greatest success in helping companies look at customer behavior on websites and to track customer representative performance and calling patterns at call centers. However, CRM adoption has lagged in the brick-and-mortar arena, which accounts for more than 90 percent of retail spending.
The CRM for retail locations tends to be short studies that don't provide results over the long term. Some retailers also are doing analysis of transaction data, but that doesn't consider the customer experience, says Hudda. "That's really the challenge that Brickstream is addressing," he adds. "We create a closed loop mechanism, so you can take action because you know that a certain event occurred."
For an up-front fee of about $10,000 to $20,000 per store and an additional $1,000 to $3,000 per month, Brickstream will collect, analyze and suggest action related to various consumer behaviors or situations at a given site.
To collect the data, Brickstream installs cameras in the ceilings of the stores. Those video feeds track customer movement in the store and pass it to computers running Brickstream software. (Customers are tracked as anonymous entities, the company says.) Brickstream Intelligence for Service software looks at how long lines are at the cash register, how many people leave the lines, how long it takes for employees to do various tasks, for example.
A second module, also available now, is called Brickstream Intelligence for Marketing. The marketing software provides analysis on the effectiveness of in-store promotions. For example, it can provide information on how many people walked by a display, how many people stopped in front of it and for how long, and where individual customers went after seeing the promotions.
A third software module, called Brick- stream Intelligence for Space, to be introduced during the second quarter, will provide information about the "hot and cold" areas of a store and the paths consumers tend to take through a store.
Brickstream customers can access the information through a web interface; the data can be fed into existing applications like a labor scheduling application; or it can flow into an existing customer operational system to allow the retailer to take immediate action such as sounding a store alert or prompting a wireless alert or e-mail to the store manager to let him or her know a person needs help in the store or has been waiting in line too long, for example.
Brickstream signed its first pilot customer in May 2001 and now has four paying customers, which it declined to name.
Retek, a leader in retail software supply for such applications as retail management, supply chain and CRM, has made a "low seven figure" investment in Brickstream, says Zoher Karu, Brickstream's director of product management. As part of the deal, Retek also will resell Brickstream solutions as an OEM.
While Hudda and Karu say their company has no immediate plans to use telecom/data service providers as a channel for its services, Brickstream is a good example of how service providers that now focus primarily on providing business customers with data and voice transport can move up the value chain with new services, either on their own or by partnering with a company like Brickstream.
