During the Spieker Point Inc. open house, Walter Schwabe from FusedLogic TV interviews Greg Campbell, President & CEO of Spieker Point about analytics for small and medium business.
Walter Schwabe:
“We’re here at Spieker Point Software Engineering and Solutions at their open house and eighth anniversary. I’m your host Walter Schwabe on FusedLogic TV on location at Spieker Points open house. I’m joined by Greg Campbell President and CEO. Greg we’ve been talking on and off throughout your open house about analytics and your services. You know there’s a myth out there that analytics is only for the big companies now you know I work with a lot of small business medium sized businesses so do you Let talk about that myth analytics is really for the entire business community isn’t it.”
Greg Campbell:
“It is. It absolutely is Walter that’s a great question you know we hear that a lot. Let’s take an example for a moment let’s look at I need a haircut. My barber for example, and I know you don’t have this problem Walter.”
Walter Schwabe:
“No I don’t need a haircut no.”
Greg Campbell:
“My barber when I walk through the door he goes holy mackerel I can’t believe that Greg Campbell is walking through my door but if he stopped and he actualy looked at my visitation pattern he would quickly realize that I come through his door about every four weeks or so and somebody who is a little bit younger than me trying to look good for the ladies you know they might come through a little bit more frequently maybe every three weeks another customer of his whose hair doesn’t grow as fast may come through every five weeks well it turns out that probability of me walking through his door I come through on day zero I can draw a probability graph that I might come through again centered around four weeks or so all of those customers that he has are additive meaning that he can look at us at the three or four or five hundred customers that he has who are regulars and he can look at the probability of people coming through their door and look for patterns associated with that visitation even somebody as small as a hair cut men’s haircut place can actually really utilize analytics to understand how busy they’re going to be in the next little while.”
Walter Schwabe:
“You know what I find interesting is what you’re really talking about is behavioral patterns of customers helping small businesses dig into that side of the business and if they can get that customer that’s coming in every five weeks or six weeks and get them to come in maybe one more time in a month that can have a dramatic impact on the bottom line across a year in terms of time.”
Greg Campbell:
“That’s exactly right you look at the yearly visitation of a person to a barber kind of thing and somebody like me I want to feel like I’m taken care of so if I were to get a text message from my barber saying you typically come in on a Wednesday I’ve got a free spot coming in that maybe a week early it may be the perfect catalyst for me to actually say yeah let’s do it before I forget about it and come in a week late and I’m looking really shaggy.”
Walter Schwabe:
“I doubt that you’d ever look really shaggy. Let’s talk a little bit about the online side of analytics and how it impacts marketing and how it impacts brand positioning you know that’s the area we like to play in as well with our clients in terms of analyzing data behavioral patterns of audiences and targeting audiences how do you see that evolving going forward?”
Greg Campbell:
“That’s a wide open market Walter I mean there’s so much work being done there we have a product that’s positioned there specifically in the emergency management arena looking for keywords being uttered by tweets and facebook posts and stuff like that emergency words in this particular case now where we’re finding the problem is that a computing science term called natural language processing if somebody for example tweets that the dance floor is on fire our software would actually pick that up and say maybe we need to deploy a fire truck let’s bring this to somebodies attention that nuance that is the fact that the dance floor vibes are just incredible in that particular place.”
Walter Schwabe:
“A lot of people dancing.”
Greg Campbell:
“Exactly it’s very difficult for software at this point to pick it up so we need to do a lot of work in that realm but there’s as I say.”
Walter Schwabe:
“It’s a fascinating area though.”
Greg Campbell:
“Absolutely.”
Walter Schwabe:
“Greg thank you again so much for expanding on all of these really cool topics. Once again we’re joined with Greg Campbell President and CEO of Spieker Point here at their open house. I’m your host Walter Schwabe on FusedLogic TV.”