With a mission to help enterprises across multiple industries better understand and engage customers, Cloud4Wi stepped into the market in the year 2013. Its application suite provides brick and mortar businesses with accurate insights into customers’ in-store behavior, along with powerful, location-based marketing tools to engage them in meaningful ways, helping drive revenue in unprecedented ways.
Since the beginning, the founders of the organization understood that brick and mortar businesses were missing a huge opportunity to connect with their customers. Most businesses already had the WiFi infrastructure in place and they could have leveraged it to better understand and engage their customers. At the end, they were looking forward to say that WiFi could play a key role in transforming the customer experience.
Soon the organization was able to raise Series A funding with United Ventures, a European venture capitalist company, which helped it to develop a powerful and robust guest WiFi platform. Then in 2017 the company closed $ 11.5 million Series B financing round.
Ground Breaking Solutions
Cloud4Wi’s AI-driven application suite enables retailers to easily collect and manage the identity of their customers, in compliance with privacy regulations (for example, GDPR), and unearth in real time the behaviors of customers within their stores. With this in-depth knowledge of who the customers are and how they behave, retailers can empower their marketing strategies to reach the right audience, at exactly the right place and time, and through the right channel.
Cloud4Wi strives to be a data-driven SaaS company with a customer success approach (land, expand, renew) that empowers global retailers to:
- Get to know their customers, turning them from anonymous visitors into loyal shoppers;
- Understand offline customer behaviors with powerful analytics;
- Bridge offline and online worlds to deliver better customer experiences.
The Massively Experienced Leader
With the background in marketing, technology, and economics, with experience in the media-telco industry with a focus on nextgeneration networks and services Andrea Calcagno serves as the Chairman, CEO and Co-founder of Cloud4Wi. Till date he has led over 50 projects in this space, and has written multiple articles and reports when it comes to advanced wireless technologies. Calcagno kick started his career at Telecom Italia Labs in Turin. While serving for Telecom Italia labs, he performed advanced research and development activities on mobile access networks, receiving international patents on mobile broadband architectures. He has also played multiple key roles in several Italian start-ups. Later in 2003 he founded WiTech, where he served as CEO and EVP. Calcagno holds a Master’s degree in telecommunications engineering from University of Pisa.
Rethinking the Concept of Store
According to the organization, personalization of experience will be termed as the number one trend. Shoppers nowadays expect to live compelling sharing experience while they are looking for something on the online store, or any store. Nowadays stores are becoming a place where customers can spend time by listening to music, eat great food, touch, feel and play with the product and above all, hang out with their friends, community and family. Which means now retailers must rethink their concept of store.
As per Cloud4Wi, in this re-designing process, retailers must seek inspiration from Generation Z. This generation is tech –innate; they can effortlessly “swim” in the digital world, and they are used to using technology in order to personalize their experiences. Despite their young ages, they already hold unprecedented influence over family purchasing decisions and wield enormous economic power of their own. There are about 2.5 billion Gen Zs out of the 7.5 billion people currently in the world, and their spending power at close to $200 billion annually when you factor in their influence on parental or household purchases.
Future Roadmap
When it comes to the future, Cloud4Wi believes, the evolutionary path in the retail market is well defined. Retailers must prepare themselves for the unified commerce if they want to stay ahead of the game. Cloud4Wi firmly believes that the physical stores still play a key role in delivering new meaningful customer-centric experiences. As an organization, it is working hard to provide retailers with the best-in-class technologies, capable of building 360-degree customer views to bridge the gap between online and offline.
Testimonial
“Cloud4Wi’s solution enables us to understand who our customers are and how they behave in the stores while respecting their privacy. Thanks to this in-depth knowledge, we will be able to deliver compelling and much more personalized experiences”. Lorenzo Bertelli, Owner and CDO, The Prada Group.
