“The truth is customers don’t care how they engage with the brand,” he explained, “they don’t care about the touch points, they just want want they want.
“So unless we think about the consumer as being the centre of this technical engagement, the art of bolting this all together becomes very confusing very quickly.”
With clients ranging from quick service restaurants, banking, telecommunications, retail to FMCG brands and directory services, VMob is listed on the NZ stock exchange with offices in London, Singapore, Sydney and Auckland and now New York, to support its global operations.
Combing in-store beacon data, geo-location, social profiling and historic behaviour to understand customers in real-time, Bradley explained how VMob delivers offers “that will win them over”, while the technology measures the return on investment by tracking how they draw customers from the online world into bricks-and-mortar stores.
Echoing Bradley’s comment, and the work of VMob, Hritzuk reenforced the belief that despite the world evolving digitally, physical retail matters more than ever.
“Following in-depth Microsoft research we understand the concrete reasons why customers still prefer physical shopping experiences,” Hritzuk added. “People like social, emotionally enriching and rewarding experiences which don’t happen organically online.
In the eyes of Hritzuk, Microsoft, Bradley and VMob, the retail revolution is well underway, but it’s not a technology-led transformation; “consumers are leading the charge.”
“We’re constantly reminding the engineers and the technologists within our company that despite what everybody thinks, people are often ahead of technologists,” explained Hritzuk, offering insight into the mindset of consumer purchase processes.