The brick-and-mortar retailers today have shifted into wanting to know their customers monitoring those who enter their mall and ways they behave.  

MasterCall Industries works with retailers on facial recognition technology to profile customers as they enter their shops and monitor their movements. Some of the information collected includes the number of people coming in, gender, ethnicity, age-it’s about having a better understanding of the foot traffic and looking at ways to offer appropriate services to the customers.

Before the advancements in retailing analytics, the marketers’ ability to monitor media performance and promotions for sales, driving in-store traffic, and recognition of brands was greatly limited to sales and traffic trends analysis. Today, however, there are several ways that analytics bring some powerful insights to retailers.

Features of retail solution

• Captures Historical data
• Collects data on the total number of visits (leaving out staff)
• Location-based annotations
• Visitor trends, patterns, behaviour analysis
• Direct comparison of the benchmark statistics
• Access to Multi-level users
• Visitor against conversion evaluation
• API for integrating other data sets (time, POS, attendance, and NPS)
• Analysis of Traffic penetration-visitors numbers that use different zones.

Why seek out retail solutions?

Traffic Insight offers businesses with actual information on visitor movement and traffic flows. The data is recorded and presented in real time giving conversation and in-store shopper activity trends.

Combined with roster, point of sale, time, attendance and other information types, the Traffic Insight offers easy, actionable insights which improve the sales process, establish accountability and increase profitability. They do so since they offer factual information that helps in the decision-making process.

Here’s a look at some of the analytics that business owners can get by using retail solutions available today.

People counting:

These analytics are crucial to business owners since they provide information on how many visitors are in the store in a given time or at specified time periods. Using this data, retailers can understand and extract information on the number of people that entered the store as well as those that left without buying. When used with sales data, business owners can compute the store’s conversion rate.

Hot zone and dwell time:

It is also important for retails to know where people stay or go within a store. This is referred to as hot zones and dwell time. The trajectory analysis enables store managers to optimise store layouts for strategic product placement. Additionally, this data may be used in evaluating or enhancing the effectiveness of advertising displays and sales.

Customer behavior:

Analysing customer behavior is less statistical but it provides fine-tuned information about ways customers interact with adverts and products in the store. Such information also creates a better understanding of the customer's buying decisions.

Consumer Attention analysis:

This analysis is key to understanding customer behavior when it concerns desire, attention, and feeling. For instance, when a customer is within the range of static cameras, inside the digital Point-of-Sale screen, gaze provides data about the person’s focus point. With this, retailers can understand what attracts people to the advertisement and the time-span people looked at it. Also, this may be used in store shelves. Gaze estimations help retailers on defining the optimal position of products in shelves, carry out statistics about several applications and the most attractive products.

Demographics:

Knowing the demographics of shoppers in stores across chains or at specific locations helps in determining the success of designed campaigns to employ target segments. Meaning that advertising messages shown through digital signage, for example when placed at Point-of-Sale, can be customised for specific target audiences, to increase engagement due to the relevance of the message it carries.

As a platform, Kairos allows customers to use multiple capabilities, this leads to more questions being answered about your business and your users. The ‘Human Metrics’ is derivable from Human Analytics and they measure human responses which we capture for the analysis.

How can you ensure data collection is secure?

The thought of having cameras and sensors to collect information about shoppers shows that business owners are investing significant amounts of money to prevent data breaches and securing data.

Irrespective of whether a client is explicitly known, this technology may be prone to creepiness, thus it relies heavily, on being secure and data it delivers. This can be achieved through the shopper opt-in requirements as well as improved data storage about shopper behaviors-and not identities.

Facial Recognition As a Retail Solution.

• Links offline and online experiences.

Online shopping enables retailers to develop consumer profiles by looking at consumer activities during various online sessions. The Facial-recognition software helps merchants link their customers’ offline and online behaviors and to create limitless shopping navigation. For example, a shopper can order groceries online and in-store facial-recognition cameras bring her order once she approaches the store.

• Express better understanding.

This software can collect information that will not only reveal basic demographic information, like gender, age, and race but the spots in the store where shoppers linger, how long they take in choosing a specific cereal brand and-importantly-the mood conveyed by a shopper expression. Such findings, across the board, allows retailers to fine tune the in-store displays used and live promotions whilst localising the pain points that cause the pained looks.

• Prevents theft.

Theft is a problem that trickles down to shoppers. Since theft costs retailers, so most of these costs get passed down to shoppers in the form of hiked prices. Theft, especially when it’s organized, tends to reduce the availability of specific products in the store. Luckily, many shoppers are comfortable using facial recognition to help guard against issues like shoplifting.

Since digital devices are already placing facial recognition within the power of people, this technology is bound to spread dramatically. Its role in retail will mostly depend on how well the retail industry expresses its goals, and they are recognizing the fact that consumers already know what they are thinking. To help open their minds means that retailers have to clearly tell shoppers how they’ll benefit from this technology.