Future of Retail - Interview with INEO Solutions

The increasing integration of technology into retail is both informing and transforming the ways brick-and-mortar retailers are able to engage with their customers. Hear from Kyle Hall, CEO of INEO Solutions as he gives us a peek into the future of retail, where tech solutions enable retailers to service their customers better.

Transcription

Hi, I'm Kyle Hall. I'm the CEO of INEO Solutions Inc. We are a technology company based in Surrey, BC. We produced a patented, innovative solution that provides retailers with loss prevention front entrance technology to the retail store, while at the same time providing digital signage and data analytics collection so that they can better operate their stores. 

COVID has had a big impact on retailers. The retailers were already under pressure before COVID hit. We heard about the retail apocolyse and how online pressures and online competitors were starting to take business away from retailers. So, they were already thinking about investing in their business and what they had to do. COVID made it much worse, of course. Stores were closed, customers wanted to stay away. They had to really get efficient and they had to really get back to the basics of servicing their customers. Our company is all about how do we help them technologically service those customers? How do we help the retailer deliver solutions so that they can provide their customers with a better look at what services they have in the store and what products they sell? Retailers that are doing that are getting a leg up on the others and what we will see coming out of the pandemic are that retailers that are more efficient and better able to service their customers will succeed and thrive. 

Big data and data analytics will transform retailers going forward. Online retailers know a lot about their shoppers and they know when they come, what they look at, what they visit. They don't quite have that same capability in store, but to be able to target demographics in the store environment, know who's coming and going from their store in a general sense. Not specific people, but actually demographic-wise. Do we know we have more female shoppers than male? Do we know that our shoppers are older? Are they younger? Are customers leaving the store happy? If retailers have some basic information like that, they can change their practices to try and improve those metrics every single day.

At INEO, we have technology that allows them to do that. We place it right at the front entrance of the store and we give them great data points that they can then manage and analyze on an ongoing basis. The secret really is not so much about collecting the data. There's a lot of technology that has to be there to collect that data, but it's actually about interpreting the data, analyzing the data and making it actionable so that they can get things done from it. 

At INEO, we're pretty buoyed by the fact that retailers are going in this direction of using big data and that they're going to be able to adjust their operations on it. So that's giving us immense opportunity to expand our services. The number of large retailers testing our services right now is going up every week. We're getting recognized around North America and in some places even around the world. They understand that this Surrey-based company has a solution that they can use and we believe the future is wide open for us to take a large market share as we go forward.