Xenio Systems
Empowering the Next Generation of Retail Shopping

Retailers are increasingly hurting from the major disconnect between online and in-store shopping experiences. The ability of ecommerce platforms to track shoppers’ behavior on their websites helps retailers in personalizing the shopping experience for each customer by showing up the products or brands of their choice. On the contrary, physical stores are unable to track shopper behavior, resulting in their inability to offer a personalized experience to shoppers. The Internet of Things (IoT) is at the forefront of the movement to address this problem. “We give retailers a unique and sophisticated platform needed to compete with pure-play ecommerce sites and to unify their online and offline shopper journeys. We do this by enabling them to track in-store customer behavior and engage with their visitors in a very individualized, contextual way,” says Reza Raji, CEO of Xenio Systems, a commercial IoT platform provider headquartered in San Francisco, CA.

According to Raji, deploying IoT inside a store, delivered through the lighting infrastructure, can help track shopper movements around products and brands in a very precise way. The Xenio end-to-end platform comprises of cloud-connected smart modules that get integrated into the lighting fixtures and create an invisible fabric of Bluetooth beacons. “Unlike traditional beaconing, this is a highly accurate indoor positioning system that collects shopper behavior data in the cloud, allowing retailers to offer new value added services and a dramatically enhanced shopping experience,” explains Raji. The platform can also be used for understanding customer choices as also understanding and optimizing employee activity within a store. “The manager can monitor how and where the sales associates are spending their time in the store,” states Raji. On their part, the sales associates too can track customers who are in need of help. All these help retailers in optimizing and maximizing their existing revenue channels.

For stores with both online and offline presence, Raji believes a seamless integration between the two worlds is badly needed; he highlights two scenarios that could be realized with Xenio platform— customers walking into the store being shown the product they had searched for on the retailer’s website earlier.

A highly accurate indoor positioning system that collects shopper behavior data in the cloud, allowing retailers to offer new value added services and a dramatically enhanced shopping experience

And conversely, a customer who left a physical store without buying anything, being shown the product they hovered around in-store, online. Not only does this improve the customer experience, but also helps the retailer in forecasting demands better through the shopper behavior data stored in cloud, improving inventory and supply chain management for the retailer. The ability of a single platform to support retailers with multiple benefits is a key differentiating factor for Xenio, which Raji says has contributed to the product’s success.

The success of Xenio Platform is attributed to company’s “renaissance approach” to problem solving by the domain experts in IoT, retails, lighting, software, electrical engineering, embedded systems, and mechanical engineering, all functioning as a “well-oiled machine”. The company believes that “mashing” different and disparate domains result in new products. “Many ground breaking innovations have happened when people and companies dabble at the edge where multiple industries and markets meet,” adds Raji.

The company’s investments on innovation have resulted in its intellectual property having over 60 patents around lighting, IoT, positioning and mechanical design. “We’re investing heavily on delivering very unique solutions,” states Raji. Xenio is gearing up for a product launch in the first quarter of 2017. “It is going to be a game-changing platform in terms of the specific end-to-end hardware and software components and how they solve a massive pain-point in a completely new way,” concludes Raji.