Retail sales are now again reaching the pre-COVID levels with a 96% recovery. As you make your way back to normalcy, your retail business faces a spectrum of challenges. You need to take strong measures to ensure the safety of your customers and staff and follow COVID norms to avoid hefty fines. Understanding the buying behavior of your customers is a new challenge in itself. Costs of manual efforts for sales, operations, supply chain management, and now COVID compliance amount to a significant part of your store’s revenue. In the modern retail environment, driven by advanced technology, retail video analytics is set to augment your business ventures while optimizing the cost structures. Before we dive into the technological benefits of video analytics for your retail business, let’s look at the challenges you need to overcome.
Challenges faced by retailers in the pandemic-hit, digitized era:
- Lack of understanding of changing customer behaviour
Your industry has inculcated technology in various verticals over the years, including capturing digitized feedback at check-out and CCTV monitoring. But traditional feedback systems fail to track and understand the customer buying behavior, and what products they like and dislike in the stores. Neither can your roaming assistant buyers keep track of buyer demographics and behavioral information. Constant manual analysis of CCTV surveillance videos is not feasible and doesn’t deliver a detailed analysis of customers’ emotions and preferences. So, how can you capture strong revenue-generating insights automatically? Retail video analytics solves this enigma for you in a seamless manner, which we have thoroughly discussed later.
- Low adoption of technology
A significant amount of your customers are millennials, and they are becoming more tech-savvy every day. With technology governing every aspect of their daily lives, the digitized era has set high standards for you to deliver a convenient, automated, and personalized customer experience. Investments in retail-tech startups have trebled to $843 million so far.
Manual check-outs and payments, slow-moving queues, intrusive COVID compliance checks, mismanaged parking, and generic product placement give an obsolete touch to the buying experience for your customers.
For an enhanced, tech-driven shopping experience, you need to find modern ways to automate manual operations. You would be glad to know that the discussed challenges make the use-cases for video analytics in the retail industry, which is just what we are leading to.
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Adherence to COVID-19 norms
Your business is always on the cusp of facing high penalties and fines if any of the government-mandated COVID guidelines are violated. It is quite labor-intensive to ensure compliance non-intrusively through manual checks. Also, it needs the constant presence of security staff at all locations within your multi-store locations. If this process could be automated and the manual efforts eliminated, it would highly optimize the costs required to comply with the mandatory COVID norms, saving your expenditures and possible penalties.
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Supply chain management
Given the increased number of internet users and orders, retailers like you are delivering more products through the eCommerce channels than ever before. There is a significant increase in the need for more security, safety, inventory, and delivery management staff. Clearly, manual management is not a cost-effective option.
You need an automated, cost-effective solution that efficiently tracks the on-loading and off-loading of products and monitors the TAT for better time optimization and on-time delivery.
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Store maintenance and ad costs
There is a lack of insight into how many buying assistants and help desk managers you need in-store to assist the buyers. Unclear anticipation of the types of customers that might visit your store on a particular day often leads to overstocking or understocking. Furthermore, ad costs are not spent effectively due to a lack of analysis of the store locations. With dashboard-driven demographics via retail video analytics, you can effectively find out which places are visited by what gender, age groups, and when.
A few years ago, CCTV monitoring was an apt solution for guarding stores and keeping track of operations. But the challenges faced by you then weren’t as buyer-oriented, digitally rooted, and caused by a pandemic. The rapid digitization, increasing eCommerce dependency, and the need for a personalized product shopping experience require a more advanced, technology-driven, and intelligent solution.
Three reasons why retailers are leveraging video analytics:
To help comply with COVID-19 norms
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Video analytics for retail automates mask and temperature detection in a completely non-intrusive manner. The analytics mechanism triggers alerts if your customers or staff are not wearing masks and keeps a constant temperature check. A similar alert-driven system is followed for sanitization, disinfection, and hygiene maintenance.
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Video analytics further helps you ensure compliance in your stores through constant crowd management. You are instantly informed if the headcount increases more than a specified number in all store locations, thereby preventing any COVID hotspots.
To increase sales and ROI
- Advanced ML algorithms draw a simplified buying behavior and sentiment analysis to help you analyze your product engagement and customers’ buying behavior. These reports and dashboards are created in real-time as your customers view an ad, engage with a product, or visit a particular store location.
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Demographic and dwell time analysis determine the gender, age, and interests of different customers. You can segment your customers by identifying the time and day of the week they visit your store and how much time they spend in what section.
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Retail video analytics leverages footfall tracing to draw in-store heatmaps for you. You can then identify and mark customer movement patterns for better product placement, inventory management, staffing, and ad delivery, ultimately driving higher sales and ROI.
For simplified, automated, and cost-effective retail operations
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The advanced video analytics solution empowers you with queue management for hassle-free checkout and governance of COVID compliance simultaneously, delivering a rich in-store experience.
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It detects and delivers the start and end times of inventory loading and unloading. You can then utilize this information to determine the TAT for these operations. The AI-powered CCTV analytics can even check if a supervisor is present while loading & unloading your products and how many employees are involved in the process. With these insights, you can specify the number of employees required and optimize personnel costs.
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You can implement better personnel deployment with the face recognition feature of video analytics for retail. You can check the time spent by customers with the sales executives in specific store locations. And then, you can deploy the most engaging and sales-enhancing personnel for high-end product locations.
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This intelligent technology enables hassle-free parking management by reading the start and end times of cars and searching in the business database for addressing disputes.
With these intelligent features backed by ML, you just need a few more things ticked on your checklist for incorporating a retail video analytics solution in your stores- quick deployment, cost-effectiveness, and rapid, real-time results. Our video analytics solution for your retail stores, AIVis, eases your way to analytics with
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Cost-effective structure: It builds on your existing CCTV infrastructure.
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Plug-and-play video analytics server: Once deployed in your stores, it automatically starts processing the video feeds.
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Lowest deployment TAT: We offer the possibly quickest deployment, as low as two days based on your infrastructure.
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Locally active and secure: AIVis works in an end-to-end secured network. Data is stored locally in a secure CPE even when the internet is down and is transmitted to the dashboard as soon as the internet connection is restored.
Additionally, we offer 24*7 monitoring and management for providing you real-time support with the AiVis solution. Our expertise in deploying comprehensive technical solutions makes us efficient in understanding your existing network. We best leverage its features for delivering a suitable video analytics solution for your retail stores. To drive your ROI in a better direction with an automated, advanced analytics solution, reach out to us today.
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