7 Reasons Analytics Should Be Part Of Your Next Retail Camera Install

By Jumbi Edulbehram, Regional President, Americas, Oncam

Retailers are focused on many things that reach far beyond loss prevention and security, including long-term growth, return on investment for technology, streamlining services and support to customers, and gathering business intelligence to help translate data to sales. The trend toward retail analytics isn’t new, but advancing technologies and techniques, coupled with the many new opportunities they offer to retail customers continues to drive opportunity for increased intelligence and data capture.

Companies are bringing together video data with transactional data and marketing statistics to bring actionable insights to the big picture of retail sales. But going further than that, retailers need the investments in analytics and video data management to add value. Here are some reasons analytics should be part of your next retail camera install.

Customer Service. One of the most important aspects of any brick-and-mortar retail location is dedication to customer service. This single factor can make or break a retail business. Built-in video analytics can help address customer service issues on the sales floor through people counting and occupancy analysis, which can let managers know when a certain area of the store is becoming busy or crowded. This enables managers to redirect employees to busy areas to offer customer service.

Traffic Patterns. Ever wondered if a specific display caught the eye of your customers and pushed them to purchase a product? Analytics can help capture this information by counting those people who stop in a certain area of the store. Other departments — such as marketing or store operations — can use this valuable data to better market products and control the flow of traffic through a store.

Queue Management. People-counting analytics help retailers ensure customers aren’t waiting too long to be processed through checkouts. Not only can this boost customer service, this can help retailers capture those who may be in a hurry and more willing to put merchandise back than wait in lines, which can mean an increase in sales.

Flow Of Traffic. Software that offers heat mapping can help retailers better design the retail floor by understanding traffic patterns and arranging merchandise and displays to eliminate areas of congestion and to direct customers to low-traffic areas. This can help translate traffic to sales.

Conversion. A fundamental metric, people counting enables retailers to calculate their customer conversion rate (the number of people in the store versus the number of purchases made). With this information, managers are more informed to staff the store based on the average number of people in a specific time period or area of the store.

C-Suite Buy-In. More and more managers require solid return on investments, and frequently, security budgets are adversely affected. When multiple departments such as loss prevention, health and safety, marketing and store operations can use video data, greater ROI can be achieved.

Seeing The Whole Picture. To cost-effectively gather the kind of video that can support analytics and deliver superior images, many retailers are turning toward omnidirectional cameras, such as those with a 360-degree field of view. These cameras can provide a much larger coverage area enabling retailers to lower camera count for the same amount of coverage.

Retailers are only now beginning to realize the extended potential of analytics in regards to multi-department collaboration and advancing technology. As analytics usage grows, so too can business intelligence that allows insight previously unavailable to retailers, which can lead to more efficient and successful loss prevention, marketing and customer service efforts.

Jumbi Edulbehram is currently the Regional President, Americas, for Oncam, a maker of 360-degree cameras and software. He is responsible for all sales, marketing and business development activities in the Americas. Prior to Oncam, Jumbi served as the Director of Business Development for the security division of Samsung Techwin, where he was responsible for managing strategic partnerships with technology partners, consultants/A&Es, and large national integrators. His team was also responsible for developing new business in industry segments such as retail, government and transportation.