Thomas Walle, CEO Today, there are several ways through which retailers can have a holistic view of their customers’ in-store journey. For instance, cutting-edge tools like smart cameras and other sensors let retailers observe a visitor’s movements, and insights into transaction data and Point of Sales (POS) data enable them to personalize the in-store shopping experience. But, when customers leave the store, retailers have very have limited insights into their shopping behavior, what other stores they visit, and how far they drove to get to the store.
To thrive in today’s competitive retail market and make critical business decisions around improving the customer experience, improving the store performance and select where to open or close stores, retailers need to have a comprehensive view of their customers’ human mobility patterns. In the last years, improved positioning methods and advanced technologies around location data have opened up new dimensions and opportunities for analyzing human mobility data – to the benefit of retailers.
Unacast—a leading location data platform, building the Real World Graph
®, democratizes access to human mobility data to help businesses understand their customers’ movement in the physical space and enabling them to make smarter decisions and to build better products.
While retailers have a good understanding of what’s happening inside the store – we help them what their customers are doing outside the stores
“While retailers have a good understanding of what’s happening inside the store – we help them what their customers are doing outside the stores. With our Real World Graph
®, we help them better understand and improve store performance, where to open up new stores to expand their market share and help them attract new and valuable customers. Our Insights and Analytics team works closely with our clients to ensure their most pressing business challenges are addressed and solved with our data,” says Thomas Walle, CEO of Unacast.
Started out of Norway five years ago, and now headquartered in NYC, Unacast has built a sophisticated and accurate location data platform rooted in data science. In addition to understanding how customers move around certain stores and venues through their Venue Insights, Unacast also understands how customers move through neighborhoods through their Neighborhood Insight. “Together, these give a unique and holistic view of the customer behavior our retail clients see as a critical addition to their current in-store data assets,” says Walle.
Finally, these venue- and neighborhood-level insights are delivered in three ways based on client specifications—as a data file, through an API, or as a comprehensive report.
Furthermore, to ensure integrity and transparency, Unacast has built the company with a privacy-first mentality “We have experience in the markets of Europe and Norway, which are highly regulated when it comes to data. This is the key aspect that has helped us emerge as a leader in the U.S. market,” comments Walle.
Honing such capabilities, Unacast has built a strong relationship with many of its clients. In one instance, CARTO—a location intelligence platform—faced problems while helping a local food truck business who needed to place trucks depending on revenue prediction models. Working with the client, Unacast provided location data insights. Finally, leveraging Unacast data, CARTO made accurate revenue and site selection predictions for its client and helped them to increase sales.
Driven by such unparalleled instances of customer success, Unacast is rapidly growing and continuously expanding its analytical capabilities to provide more valuable insights to retailers. Unacast is close to 50 people strong, has raised $30m to date from leading investors in the U.S. and Europe. “Our key focus is on unlocking the untapped value of human mobility data to drive innovation in the retail sector and to help them understand their customers better,” Walle concludes.
