At the Citi/Bain Capital Ventures Advanced Retail Technology Conference last week (or as we commonly call it, Deborah Weinswig and Scott Friend’s event), I had the chance to view the near-future of omni-channel retail from a very different perspective: that of heavy-hitting investors – and the newest generation of technology vendors in which they feel confident enough to invest.

Make no mistake – this was not a networking event. There were no real breaks to speak of (not even for lunch). The sessions were brief, and I seriously doubt anyone would complain that any vendor had too much time. There also weren’t any real product demos. So I have no idea if any of these next-gen vendors’ products can do what they say they do. But that’s part of the whole point here at RSR: when a technologist claims they can solve a problem, we tend to believe them: if they can’t, the market will bear that out quickly enough. Instead, what the lengthy list of technologists focused upon was their quick-pitch reason to exist and in doing so, demonstrated just what earned them their spot in the Bain portfolio.

Having not heard of many of the vendors in question, here are a few RPW readers might be interested in knowing about:

First, Online

The company is called TellApart, and CEO Josh McFarland’s product was born of his years at Google. If 98% of online shoppers don’t end up buying a product, McFarland ‘s platform seeks to understand more about the 2% who do. This means we’re getting into retargeting technologies that we’ve previously described as “somewhat creepy “, but here’s where TellApart differs: A customer visits a site, pokes around and leaves. All of the data available about that shopper (browser type, page dwells, etc) is made available to the vendor, and shortly thereafter the shopper is hit with a display ad – but TellApart doesn’t get paid if a consumer clicks on that ad, they only get paid if the sale converts. How can this be?

Here are the numbers: 8% of shoppers click on the retargeted ads (nothing fancy, mind you, just animation-free banner ads). Of those 8%, 4.5% actually convert. And even with these number, the company is making money and building a serious client list. Why? To paraphrase McFarland, retailers simply cannot do this on their own because there just aren’t many people on earth who have the engineering skills required to do it properly. But Google certainly did/does, and TellApart’s pedigree brings us one step closer to effective (and hopefully more relevant) retargeting ads in the online shopping experience. I’m eager to learn more about this company.

Then, In-Store

I’d just learned of Experiticy a week prior to the event, and in spite of a less-than-ideal company moniker, based on what we saw in this year’s annual Store Report, the solution immediately caught my interest. In that report, retailers told us that they clearly recognize the need to increase the helpfulness of their store associates. But the best performers told us they also recognize the challenge isn’t just in giving their associates access to more product information; it’s in getting more out of them all the way around. They know that people come to stores for a reason, and improving store execution and making it more consistent is only that much more valuable if you can also be making better use of associates’ time during off-peak hours. Enter Experticity.

Like all employee product training tools, it holds opportunity to give store associates a better chance of being able to communicate with increasingly-educated consumers. But what makes it interesting is how it does this: the manufacturer pays for the material delivered via online portal, and the retailer only pays if they want add on-services (private label training, POS metrics, etc). So for a sporting goods retailer like REI selling multiple brands, they may have supplier-funded training for 9 out of 10 of the women’s lightweight hiking parkas that they sell, none of which they’ve had to pay for. The retailer can also see metrics about what is driving/differentiating these sales, and according to CEO Tom Stockham, the metrics prove that absentee manufacturers are feeling the hit of non-participation. So far, Experticity works a lot with the categories of sporting goods, beauty and aftermarket auto parts. Interesting stuff, and if it works like it claims to, not a moment too soon.

And for the Combination of the Two

CQuotient’s COO Graeme Grant explained his company’s big data solution as one where physical store POS data sits at the solution’s core, upon which email logs, web logs and unstructured marketing and social commerce data are layered in order to predict the omni-channel consumer’s taste. The resulting “taste cube ” is not a static “if/then ” affinity metric, but rather a living, breathing descriptor of a consumer that is constantly updated in real-time (ie milliseconds).

What makes this product different is that unlike many of the next-gen solutions which seek to apply traditional, hands-on CRM service in the new omni-channel world, it claims to work in both high-visit and low-visit environments. Citing an example where social media trolling turned up the word “Vegas ” in several customers’ description of a woman’s blouse, CQuotient learned that price is not the only lever a retailer can pull. “Sometimes, just saying ‘I get you’ creates a meaningful and relevant connection – they key is to do it tastefully without human involvement. ” From my perspective, anything that brings more “personal ” and relevance to the current state of personalization is worth another look.

All told, I’d like to thank the event’s hosts for having me. Despite the very long day (my poor decision to take a train for this daytrip led to a nearly 19 hour journey door-to-door), the content made it entirely worth it. It’s not every day you get a chance to hear incredibly bright people – many of them engineers -explaining how their newest-generation solutions set about solving age-old retail problems in a common language that’s easily understood and appreciated by a business audience. Kudos to Ms. Weinswig and Mr. Friend for doing just that.