Video analytics and IP camera technology were adopted in the retail industry with an aim to avoiding or reducing the losses from activities such as shoplifting and employee fraud.

Nowadays, retail video analytics is not just about loss prevention, but also a key tool for business growth. Video Management System, with built-in Video analytics capability, can help retailers stay competitive by providing insights for delivering value to customers and increase loyalty. Moreover, the ability of video analytics technology to process a large amount of data on a real-time basis can help retailers enhance customer experience in various scenarios.

Let us take a look at a few ways how retail video analytics enhances customer experience as well as the performance of your retail store.

Studying real-time customer behavior

Retailers really need effective product placement, but what if they can optimize it to know what kind of placement converts well? It is one of the requirements that can be addressed with video analytics. Apparently, video analytics helps monitor consumer behavior around special offer placements. It also helps a retailer get insights such as:

• Whether consumers compared a particular product with other brands?
• Whether they looked at an item or spent significant time?
• Whether they picked a product?
• Whether they bought multiple products?

With a powerful video analytics capability, retailers can track and analyze buying behavior of each buyer. This in-turn can also help identify the customer who is more willing to buy. Additionally, retailers having e-commerce applications or websites can integrate data from the same to analyze in-depth buyer profile and engagement behavior.

Video analytics systems with strong cognitive algorithms are powerful enough to identify demographic information such as age, gender, etc., and bring a great deal in terms of identifying behavioral patterns with products.

Enhancing customer experience

Video technology can help in delivering a quality experience to customers during their store visit. The video data collection and analytics enable identifying peak times, traffic patterns, and high occupancy zones store location. These analytics can further help retailers to reduce the waiting time for the customer, whether being at a particular location, parking or in checkout counters.

Another use case is to utilize historical data for staffing to power-up decision making process. Moreover, with real-time video monitoring and analytics, retailers can identify trends and build strategies to enhance customer experience accordingly.

In terms of alerting in Video Analytics, there are few emerging use cases which can enhance customer experience. For example, an alert is triggered when a customer spends more than a defined time at a particular place. For this scenario, a store manager can send a store assistant to the customer to help him out with their requirements/issues.

Mapping customer journeys with engagement and conversions

Tracking customer visits and journeys with video analytics is the most popular use case in video analytics for retail store advancement. It is ideally known as Footfall Counting technique. Video analytics can give insights about how many people enters or exits the store and how many people are in the store at any given time.

It also maps customer journey patterns throughout the store, which can help retailers to strategize the product placements. It can also help in getting insights of busier sections which retailers can utilize to place display advertisements based on details such as, number of people at a specific location for a specific time.

Footfall data can further be linked to point of sale (POS) data to monitor transactional conversion compared to people entering the store. Similarly, the retailers can map the effectiveness of display advertising relatively with the transactions happening at the store.

It also delivers insights and alerts to adjust staffing based on queue length and patterns.

Identifying store performance

Video analytics also helps in identifying store performance with a technique called Heat Mapping. Heat Mapping is a graphical representation of in-store roaming and time spending patterns of customers.

In heat maps, people count and time-spends data are represented in color shades as shown below.

These Heatmaps deliver intelligence that retailers can use to build and improve the store layout with greater potential. Also, it provides a strong strategic insight for product placement. Moreover, with Heatmaps, data can be linked to display advertisements to measure the effectiveness of the campaign.

There are Heatmap applications for staff planning as well. Retailers can identify the least busy time frame and plan cleaning activities accordingly. Also, they can detect the area where more security or support staff are required.

Considering the above use cases and benefits, adopting video analytics surely seems essential for every retail store to enhance customer experience and improve bottom lines.

eInfochips provides advanced Video Analytics for multiple industries such as transportation, manufacturing and retail, covering the most common use cases for surveillance, security, and customer intelligence. To know more, get in touch with us.