Meet the team: Glenda Bemis

At Kalibrate, we believe our success is driven as much by our people as our technology. Here, we meet Glenda Bemis from our solutions engineering team.

What is your role at Kalibrate?

I am VP Customer Support & Delivery at Kalibrate, which means I’m part of the onboarding process for new clients. I work with them to understand their situation, what data they have or need, what they’re trying to achieve in our products, and how best to deliver. I also provide support from a technical aspect, so they’re getting maximum value from the tools.

What does a typical day look like for you?

I am typically meeting with clients, talking through what they want to be able to do – for example, what are the day-to-day business questions that they’re trying to answer. This means how we design our tools, how we onboard people to use them, and how they work with them on an ongoing basis, remain aligned to their core challenges. I’m always talking to different people – different business functions, different verticals, different levels of seniority – which kind of goes to like why I enjoy my job because I get to work with everybody!

What type of industries do you enjoy working with?

Honestly, I love to work with all of them. I really enjoy that our clients can range from quite small to huge companies. One day it could be a small apparel concept or QSR chain, the next day it’s an international convenience or a real estate investment trust. The variety keeps you on your toes, but in practicalities, they come to us because we have a track record of helping businesses understand their locations and market dynamics – that’s where my passion is, so I’m always having fun.

Why did you choose to join Kalibrate?

I have been with TAS (Trade Area Systems), which was bought by Kalibrate, since 2012 – right out of school! I have a GIS educational background and I found this opportunity to be part of the support team at TAS. I just thought it was so cool that there was there were companies like TAS. I didn’t even know that there were software solutions for retail real estate from a GIS perspective at the time. When you’re in school and you’re going through a geography program or GIS program, you’ll often hear that there’s work in government in this field and that’s it. When I heard about TAS and what they do, it just blew my mind and from that day that’s been it.

Since TAS became part of Kalibrate, the expanded team has been great to work with – Intalytics and eSite have also become part of Kalibrate in that time, so the breadth of knowledge is huge. We help each other, and everyone loves to help customers; because of that mindset, we work really well together. Kalibrate operates in more countries too, so I get to speak to clients in other countries – this wasn’t something we did a great deal of before. That’s exciting – a whole new world. I looking forward to all the things that we’re going to be doing in the future.

What do you think are the greatest challenges and opportunities facing retailers? 

We’ve gone through a period of accelerated change across so many avenues of life in the last decade or so. I think that it’s important for the retail sector to keep up.  The e-commerce aspects and omnichannel aspects of the retail sector are constantly changing and we saw that huge shift because of COVID – during that time, in many retail concepts, if you didn’t have a decent e-comm offer, you weren’t selling anything. Now that brick-and-mortar activity is increasing with everything opening again, we’re going to see another wave of change. For companies that can’t anticipate and respond to this change, it’s going to be a challenge. Of course, on the flip side, those that equip themselves with the insight to take the right action will reap the benefits.