Channel Mastery - Ep. 79: Greg Carter, Senior Vice President at Acuity Brands Inc.

Acuity Brands Inc.

**how beacon technology and connected buildings can improve customer service with greg carter**

“[They’re working toward using the data to] build a physical trail with all the characteristics of a shopper journey that mirrors [the same quality of data] online retailers are able to develop about their customers.”
- Greg Carter, Connected Buildings Software at Acuity Brands

epsiode preview

The technology we talk about in today’s episode seems super futuristic. But in reality, it’s happening NOW. With my guest, Greg Carter, Channel Mastery this week is devoted to bringing online data capture technology into the physical space of brick and mortar retail. We cover connected buildings, beacon technology and indoor digital GPS.

Beacon technology is literally built into the lighting structure of a store, enabling us to track data in a physical space like we do online. Want to view how customers move through your store? Linger in front of a display? Search for associates? What if you want to send your customer a time-sensitive message while they’re shopping? What if they want to request that an associate come to their location? Connected buildings can track and send that sort of data.

According to Hubspot, Target, Macy’s, CVS and Timberland (among many others) are on the beacon tech train. Greg and I bring it a little closer to home, touching on costs and applications for specialty and smaller businesses.

The value in this technology is how you respond to the results. We talk so much about creating a frictionless customer journey, this tech may be a way to ensure your customers’ in store experiences are just as seamless, efficient and rewarding.

guest profile

Greg Carter

Greg Carter is the Senior Vice President, Connected Buildings Software at Acuity Brands, Inc. He responsible for developing, productizing, selling and deploying IoT Solutions that leverage Acuity’s IoT platform and IoT-enabled lighting and building systems infrastructure. These solutions harness operational and consumer data and transform them into business insights that fuel improvements in worker efficiency, business processes, customer experience and market penetration for Acuity Brands customers.

topics covered

Internet of things, IoT, connected buildings, beacon technology, digital GPS, geofencing technology and indoor location capability, indoor location services, location data, data protection privacy laws, buy online pickup in store

select quotes

“What we've done at Acuity is…to effectively create an indoor GPS system that can allow us to create personal navigation tools. So we can enable applications on mobile devices that now know where you are, and can help guide you to things you're looking for.”
“You can do some really interesting things as you start tracking all the shopping carts that move through a store, or tracking people or employees. And you can start to understand how you can better design the store with better layouts, better layout marketing displays to improve the behavior that you want to see out of the consumers that are moving through your space.”
“We've got over 300 million square feet of retail establishments in the U.S. that have deployed this technology.”
“[They’re working toward using the data to] build a physical trail with all the characteristics of a shopper journey that mirrors [the same quality of data] online retailers are able to develop about their customers.” “We can make it easier to design the store to allow people to get to what they care about more easily.”