Digital technology is evolving and becoming progressively intelligent with each passing day. Businesses now are relying more on technology and leveraging it to find ways to increase their business efficiency. Retail AI Inspection automation platform and video analytics plays a key role in this aspect and opens new doors for retail businesses to maximize their store output.
Retailers are facing a growing problem of online shoppers using in-store visits as a showroom for products that will be purchased online. The challenge is to provide an immersive and enjoyable shopping experience that keeps customers coming back, while addressing the need to compete with online retailers.
AI based inspection automation platform with video analytics can provide retailers with insights into customer behaviour that can be used to improve the store experience, while also automate repetitive tasks such as people count. The information gleaned from video analysis can be used to customize store layouts, lighting, displays, and identify areas where process compliance is missed
Let us first understand how it helps stores gain a better understanding of customer shopping patterns.
Leveraging Video Surveillance Cameras to Study Consumer Shopping Behaviour
Retail stores have been using CCTV cameras for a long time for monitoring activities like shop-lifting, crime deterrence, and monitoring employees. To complement these camera networks, retailers are now discovering that the value of the data recorded by the cameras can be extended much beyond simple security applications.
The video content recorded by the cameras can be used to measure the traffic flow, dwell time, hot spots, product display activity, and much more in a store. The solution works by processing video to identify different objects present in the video (people, things, vehicles, etc.) and then indexing them to enable actionable information analysis.
Maximizing Store Layout and Navigation
The layout of a store is an essential parameter to ensure a smooth and successful shopping experience. By knowing the navigation patterns of the customers in the store and how much time they spend in a certain location, retailers can optimize the placement of products and in-store traffic for sales encouragement.
Optimizing Promotions and Product Displays
Retail video analytics can help derive insights that can be used to generate effective promotions and product display designs to encourage stronger engagement.
Retailers can get sensitive towards their customer’s choices or preferences and design more suitable promotions on the products that show higher customer engagement. This in return, can result in innovating new cross-merchandising ideas to increase sales of the store and a better customer relationship.
Managing the Store Traffic
A huge amount of in-store traffic is what every store owner wishes for. Analyzing video footage in real time, the store owners can comprehend what is causing the most traffic in their store.
Apart from that, retail video analytics platform can help retailers to identify traffic early and effectively respond in real-time. Many strategies can be built to keep the customers engaged and guide them to the path of purchase.
Streamlining Checkouts
Driving a customer from store entry to conversion is the basic goal of every retail store or business. A substantial number of customers discard their shopping carts when they see long queues formed at the cash counters.
This can be avoided by ensuring efficiency at checkout points. Checkout points can be set up at different locations for customers where they can get their products billed with ease.
Analyzing Consumer Demographics
Retail video analytics platform helps in analyzing consumer demographics such as face recognition and people counting, age, and gender of visitors helps identify the type of traffic coming into the store.
Insights from the cameras can be successfully used to enlarge the customer base and support merchandising strategy.
How it works?
AI based inspection platform analyzes video footage in real-time for deviations, alerting in real-time to derive action and derives insights from extract data for insights. This data can be used for a variety of purposes, here are 4 use cases of AI Video Analytics that are transforming the retails industry
1. Using Facial Recognition for Strong Customer-Brand Relationship
Retailers can conduct their business more intelligently by using video analytics based facial recognition technology. By identifying the same faces in the store, shop owners can understand the behavior of specific customers and can offer them their preferred shopping experience.
For instance, when a repeat customer comes to the store, as per their previous shopping history, retailers can voluntarily offer customers the products of their usage. This helps in creating a strong trust relationship between the customer and your store. The probability of customer retention in such scenarios is the highest.
2. Placing Heat Maps for In-Store Consumer Tracking
Heat maps help identify the number of people visiting a specific aisle or product display rack using their head and foot movement. According to the count of people and time spent by them in a particular area, store owners can figure out the most popular aisles where most customers stop to shop. Consequently, the product density of that in-store area can be increased.
Also, display advertisements can be set in these prominent locations for enhancement in the sales of the store.
3. Maximizing Store Layout with Data
Knowing the pathway that a typical consumer follows when they navigate through the shop can be beneficial for creating a new sales strategy for the retailers. Retail video analytics platform captures the flow of people in a particular direction. It plots data of all people that enter the store to show the most traveled path in the store.
Also, it shows if the layout of the store is obstructing the movement of people and causing crowding in certain locations. If so, store owners can optimally set up the best layout for the store and increase their business efficiency.
4. Bringing Store Changes by Analyzing New Trends
It helps to analyze the behavioral patterns of the customers in the store, thus help comprehend new trends and changing customer preferences. The retail owners can get a view of the trends across multiple stores located in different areas and know which product has more time spent
According to the trends, retailers can make transitions in the store as per the customer needs. The staff can also be placed strategically at different store hot spots where they can help convert leads into sales opportunities.
Wrapping Up
AI powered inspection platform with video analytics is a much-needed technology that can result in high profitability for your store. With its right implementation, retailers can enhance customer service, improve store layout, and derive data-driven marketing and merchandising strategies to achieve high efficiency. It helps gain a competitive edge by collecting more store traffic and customer data and capitalize video monitoring investments.
Our AIVID platform helps retail business leverage the capabilities of Automated Inspection and derive actionable insights to drive improvements in the store. AIVID works on already installed IP camera systems. Click here to talk to an expert or schedule a demo to see AIVID in action.