Qsic Helps Retailers Better Understand Their Customers

“It was a no-brainer to integrate PubNub into our product. We looked at the SDKs and saw how easy it was to implement. We were up and running in under a week.” Gerard Smith, Chief Technology Officer at Qsic

Meet Qsic 

Qsic curates music, targeted audio, and advertising for retail environments. Their aim is to help retailers better understand their customers by offering a platform that analyzes the current in-store conditions and implements change in real time. 

Through their platform, Qsic lets its customers gain better visibility into what is happening in their stores by using smart speakers that easily integrate with the software in retail stores. Their platform analyzes a variety of factors such as who is in the store, the time of day, store location, and the weather to enhance the customer experience. 

What originally started out as a commercial music streaming service, has since evolved into an in-store optimization platform that provides insight on how background music and audio affects buying patterns. 

To help deliver this reliable connectivity for their customers, Qsic turned to PubNub. 

Ensuring continuous operability for customers

Qsic uses PubNub for IoT device control in their smart speaker partners. All smart speakers that are installed in a retail store are integrated with PubNub for remote device control and monitoring. “Our frontend integrates with PubNub to signal to our IoT device, which passes commands on to the smart speakers to ensure the correct music or audio is playing and allows us to monitor what's happening in our customers' stores,” said Gerard Smith, Chief Technology Officer at Qsic. 

For instance, retailers have real-time visibility and control over the devices in their store network. From checking if the audio and advertisements are working properly to ensuring that devices are performing, their platform uses this targeted messaging to encourage purchasing and improve the customer experience. 

Since using PubNub, customers can also stream messaging without delays, regardless if connectivity was lost due to an internet outage. Qsic sends commands to their IoT devices to reroute streams to play curated audio content, ensuring continuous operability.

Having this reliable, real-time communication allows for an improved in-store experience—which helps encourage customer loyalty and retention. 

Decreasing development time 

For Qsic, building their IoT platform with PubNub has been seamless from the beginning. “It was a no-brainer to integrate PubNub into our product,” said Smith. “We looked at the SDKs and saw how easy it was to implement. We were up and running in under a week.” 

Because of PubNub, Smith and his team can focus their efforts on iterating and building the features that their customers need without having to worry about development time and maintenance, which is important as they continue to grow. 

“PubNub allows this process to be seamless and quick,” said Smith. “These commands are going directly to our IoT devices, which allows you to see and hear these actions taking place in real time.”

Building a reliable and efficient IoT platform 

As Smith looks to the future, he feels confident that Qsic will be able to easily scale their platform as their usage grows to deliver customers the real-time data and essential information they need. 

With PubNub, Qsic has found a partner that allows them to effortlessly build real-time monitoring, signaling, and device control in their IoT platform to help improve the customer experience. 

If you would like to learn how PubNub can help you easily power your real-time experiences at scale, try our APIs for free.