The Internet of Things refers to networks of physical objects—devices, sensors, machines, vehicles, and even store fixtures—that are embedded with software and connectivity, enabling them to collect and exchange data. These objects aren’t simply transmitting technical status reports; they’re observing the physical world and reporting back in real time. What a customer touches, how long they pause in front of a display, when a product is running low, how ambient conditions might affect usage—IoT devices capture all of this with precision and speed.
For marketers and sales leaders, IoT services are more than a technology trend—they’re a transformational data source. IoT systems can provide access to behavioral signals and context that are often invisible to digital analytics alone. While website clickstreams or CRM data offer insight into what customers say or select, IoT data captures what customers do, feel, and experience in the physical world. It fills in critical blind spots across the buyer’s journey—moments that influence purchasing decisions but previously went unmeasured.
This kind of event-level visibility opens up powerful opportunities. Imagine knowing that a customer returned to a product kiosk three times in a week, or that a showroom display caused a 22% increase in dwell time among loyalty members. Imagine personalizing marketing messages based on product feature usage duration, or prioritizing sales outreach for users with unusual usage patterns. From proximity sensors and smart shelves to connected appliances and wearables, IoT provides marketers with new, granular, real-world, and actionable layers of customer intelligence.
At its best, IoT doesn’t just capture data—it enables personalization, optimization, and prediction. It helps brands move from assumption to precision: tailoring experiences to the individual, automating actions based on physical context, and forecasting future needs before they’re even expressed. For CMOs and CROs, it’s a way to bring real-world behavior into the martech stack—closing the gap between intention and impact.
In this article, we profile ten companies at the forefront of IoT innovation who are helping organizations turn connected devices into growth engines. These companies are not just enabling data capture—they’re powering new customer experiences and sales strategies through IoT services, custom integrations, and real-time analytics.
Top 10 IoT Companies Driving Customer Experience Innovation
Yalantis: IoT Solutions with Real Business Impact
Yalantis partnered with RAKwireless (a global IoT hardware provider) to create WisDM, a SaaS platform for IoT network management and maintenance. This platform enables RAKwireless’s customers to remotely configure and monitor large fleets of IoT gateways and devices.
The results have been impressive: WisDM attracted $10 million in investment and sold over 10,000 copies (subscriptions) to IoT hardware customers. By offering this software solution alongside its hardware, RAKwireless added extra value for customers – they can onboard and manage devices remotely, see real-time device status, and even provide better support through built-in ticketing.
This enhanced IoT service has improved RAK’s customer experience and loyalty, while also generating a new revenue stream. Yalantis’s work with WisDM demonstrates how a well-designed IoT platform can drive customer experience innovation (through easier device management and support) and directly contribute to sales growth for the provider.
Oxagile: Geo-Targeted Customer Engagement
Oxagile developed a cutting-edge market research and geofencing solution for a marketing firm seeking better customer insights in retail environments. The system uses IoT sensors (iBeacons) placed in stores to detect when opt-in shoppers enter, exit, or dwell in specific locations. Shoppers receive instant survey invitations or offers on their smartphones at the right moment. For example, a push notification to take a 1-minute survey is triggered when a customer spends 5+ minutes in the electronics section. This timely approach eliminates information decay, gathering feedback while the experience is fresh.
The backend provides precise geo-targeting, allowing marketers to draw custom geofences on a store map and send location-specific messages. As a result, the client can capture in-store shopper opinions and behaviors that were previously lost, enabling more responsive marketing and store layout decisions.
This Oxagile solution enhanced customer experience by delivering relevant, contextual interactions. It gave the retailer a 30% boost in survey response rates and engagement compared to traditional feedback methods (as the real-time element incentivized participation).
ScienceSoft: Data-Driven Personalization in Retail
ScienceSoft developed a facial recognition IoT application for an Austrian retail services provider aimed at enhancing in-store personalization. The solution uses cameras at store entrances to recognize repeat customers (with their consent) and pull up their profile/preferences. This allowed store staff to tailor the experience – for instance, greeting the customer by name and offering personalized recommendations based on past purchases. The goal was to treat loyal shoppers like VIPs, similar to an online store recognizing a returning user.
The IoT system had to reliably identify faces and quickly match them to a customer database as people walked in. Once implemented, the retail client saw a notable uptick in customer satisfaction and sales: known customers received relevant suggestions and more attentive service, leading to higher conversion rates. In essence, ScienceSoft’s IoT solution brought the data-driven personalization of e-commerce into the brick-and-mortar store.
This case demonstrates how IoT can enhance CX by recognizing customers and tailoring their journey. It also highlights that even a single percentage-point increase in conversion can translate to tens of millions in revenue for large retailers – as one retail executive noted, a 1% conversion lift via such innovations significantly boosts the top line.
Cisco: Smart Stores with Analytics-Driven Sales Growth
Cisco transformed its Cisco Store (which sells Cisco merchandise) into a smart retail lab using its IoT technologies. The store deployed Meraki smart cameras and sensors and connected them with analytics tools and a cloud dashboard. These IoT devices track real-time data like customer footfall, dwell times at displays, inventory levels on shelves, and even environmental metrics (energy use, temperature).
By analyzing this data, the Cisco Store team made informed changes: for example, they optimized product placements and adjusted staffing during peak power hours to serve customers better. The outcomes have been impressive – Cisco reported a 40% year-over-year increase in revenue at the smart store, driven by reduced stockouts and more personalized customer engagement. Additionally, they cut energy usage by 66% through IoT-based smart building controls. Most importantly, the IoT analytics enabled online-level personalization in the physical store: using data, the store could adapt digital signage and promotions to match visitor demographics and preferences, resulting in higher conversion rates.
Bosch: Bridging Online and Offline Customer Journeys
Bosch Research initiated an IoT-driven customer experience project in China to digitize Bosch’s offline retail stores and connect them with online customer data. In partnership with Bosch’s local business units, they deployed an on-site digitalization toolkit in pilot stores. Key features included IoT sensors and QR codes that emulate online shopping behaviors in-store, as well as integration with the Bosch Consumer Data Center to unify data across channels. For example, a customer in a Bosch Home Comfort showroom can scan a QR code next to an appliance, instantly pull up product information on WeChat (a popular app), and add the product to their digital favorites.
With user consent, the system collects that interaction data and later uses it to show more targeted ads and recommendations to the customer (either in the store on digital displays or later via the Bosch WeChat mini-app). This project essentially blurs the line between online and offline experiences – offline store visits are captured as data, much like website clicks. The early results were promising: Bosch saw increased engagement in stores (customers spent more time interacting with products digitally) and a higher conversion of store visitors to Bosch loyalty program members.
84.51°: Cooler Screens In-Store Digital Media
Partnering with 84.51° and Cooler Screens allowed Kroger to deploy a retail-media and IoT solution with measurable audience metrics, inventory visibility, and marketing activation—all integrated into its precision marketing ecosystem. After a multi-year pilot, Kroger expanded its partnership with Cooler Screens, deploying digital smart cooler doors in 500 of its U.S. stores.
These screens integrate with Kroger Precision Marketing and its data platform 84.51°, delivering targeted content based on factors such as diet, budget, lifestyle, and promotional offers. They also visually display real-time stock availability—greyed-out when items are out of stock—and track dwell time and interaction metrics.
While specific sales lift figures weren’t publicly disclosed, Kroger noted the technology supports enhanced shopper decision-making and brand activation, and Cooler Screens estimated its platform reached over 90 million store viewers monthly. The system offers both inventory insights and at-decision-point engagement data, enabling brand advertisers to measure impression counts and launch brand promotions near the moment of purchase.
Intuz: Custom IoT App & Platform Development
Intuz partnered with SGC Investments Ltd. to build an enterprise-grade mobile platform (Jibu) that automates fuel station operations and improves nationwide delivery visibility. The system tracks real-time fuel levels, consumption, and driver delivery checkpoints across distributed locations, preventing theft and ensuring delivery accuracy.
What makes this solution a standout for sales leaders is the centralization of mission-critical sales and inventory data. By streamlining delivery logs and station-level reporting, Jibu gave SGC executives a single, data-driven interface to monitor throughput and optimize supply strategies. The result: fewer losses, faster replenishment decisions, and a tighter alignment between field operations and headquarters—all contributing to increased profitability and sales forecasting accuracy.
Intuz executed the application as we intended—and even better in some instances. The team was flexible and understood the changes we made once the project took off. We’re extremely happy with what has been produced.
David Shinganya, Director at SGC Investments
For large-scale, distributed operations like fuel networks, Intuz brings clarity and structure to what is often a fragmented, offline process. They not only integrate IoT sensors and databases but also build intuitive mobile apps that align business objectives with real-time device data. Their approach enables sales, supply chain, and marketing teams to collaborate on a unified view of physical operations, transforming logistics into a valuable data asset.
Radix IoT: Unified IoT Platform with Salesforce-Ready Integration
Radix IoT has been deployed across more than 35,000 global sites on its Mango platform, delivering remote monitoring, optimization, and automated alerts. The key feature: it easily integrates with Salesforce and other enterprise systems via Swagger/OpenAPI—a capability Radix highlights as central to turning operational IoT data into business-relevant signals.
In one deployment with major commercial property clients, Mango tracked environmental and energy data at scale and automatically pushed thresholds and alert events into Salesforce. This enabled sales and service teams to prioritize outreach (e.g. proactively offer service contracts when usage patterns exceeded expectations), trigger renewal campaigns, and optimize upsell paths based on real-world usage data.
RetailNext: In-Store Analytics and Performance Optimization
Swarovski, the iconic Austrian jeweler with over 2,300 boutiques worldwide, partnered with RetailNext to address a key question: Why were some high-traffic stores underperforming in sales? To answer this, they installed RetailNext sensors across select stores. They integrated the data with their point-of-sale (POS) system, creating a real-time feedback loop between foot traffic, zone behavior, and revenue.
This integration allowed Swarovski to:
- Measure conversion rates by comparing store visits to transactions in real time
- Identify underperforming locations by benchmarking against similarly trafficked stores
- Optimize layouts and staffing by tracking dwell time and traffic distribution across store zones
- Tailor product displays and marketing using shopper demographic data and behavioral analytics
- Refine digital engagement tools after discovering, for example, that touchscreen usage was under 2%, with <25-year-olds largely ignoring them, as revealed via eye-tracking studies.
The outcome was a measurable lift in both conversion and average transaction value (ATV). In one location, analysis showed that 65% of shoppers never moved beyond the front third of the store. By adjusting visual merchandising and staff engagement in the rear zone, Swarovski was able to increase shopping time and drive higher sales.
Lantronix: Smart Product Experiences and Servitization
Lantronix was awarded the 2024 IoT Evolution Business Impact Award for its deployment with HY‑LINE Group, which implemented smart retail shelves powered by Lantronix E214 routers and cloud-managed via Percepxion.
These IoT-enabled shelves:
- Connect wirelessly via cellular or Wi-Fi, requiring no wiring
- Display dynamic pricing, promotions, and product information
- Capture product interaction data (e.g., when tags are touched or lifted)
- Stream behavior signals back to the cloud for analytics and campaign optimization
The shelves were rolled out across multiple international retail stores, enabling brands to remotely update merchandising content and track visual engagement and lift in purchases. According to the award citation, the solution delivered analytical insights on customer buying behaviors, facilitated plug‑and‑play global deployment, and allowed brands to manage updates centrally—all driving measurable improvements in shopper engagement and sales activation. This case demonstrates how a connected physical asset (a retail shelf) can become both a marketing channel and an IoT data source.
IoT technologies are enabling companies across industries to get closer to their customers – collecting real-time data, automating responses, and delivering personalized experiences that were never before possible. The ten companies and case studies above show IoT’s impact in action: higher conversion rates, increased customer engagement, more efficient operations, and new revenue streams.
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