RetailJanuary 27th 2022

How can In-store Customer Engagement be done Safely with Video Analytics?

Written by Team Wobot

How can In-store Customer Engagement be done Safely with Video Analytics?

Introduction

In-store engagement refers to the physical interaction of customers and potential customers with your brand and the people who manage it in a brick-and-mortar business or commercial property. In-store engagement is an act of getting the customers into the store to induce customer engagement.

Although the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated various e-commerce trends, physical stores are not going anywhere because people relish the idea of shopping in physical stores. In-store engagement is here for the long run, and its ability to utilize the technology at its disposal is the key to its survival.

Importance of in-store Engagement

In-store engagement is essential because it creates an emotional connection between the customer and the brand and builds a buyer-seller relationship. It aids in increasing customer loyalty towards the brand by providing them with an improved customer experience through engaging environments. In-store engagement promotes valuable customer feedback, which gives them a sense of importance and positively affects the overall brand experience.

Why Should Businesses Focus on it?

Businesses must keep in mind that the in-store experience for a customer is like an age-old tradition that they cannot overlook. But with the increasing advancement in the technological field, they expect up-gradation in their experience. Therefore, businesses have to adopt these cutting-edge technologies such as intelligent video analytics for customer satisfaction. It will boost their sales and eventually assist in the growth of the company. A boost in sales indicates a higher return on the investments made by the retail business.

How AI helps?

With the advancement of critical technology like artificial intelligence (AI) over the years, their application has dramatically increased due to Covid-19. It bridges the significant gap between virtual websites and physical stores in real-time. In today’s time, brands and businesses need to reimagine the overall in-store experience of their customers, and technology is a critical ingredient in the same.

AI-based technologies such as video analytics help with daily task management, and with its extensive set of data combined with detailed algorithms achieve operational efficiency. Discussed below are few significant benefits that every business can derive by integrating AI-based technologies into their daily functions:

1. Acquisition

AI-powered technologies can help a physical store in attracting more customers. It processes customer and sales data and develops an understanding of products and the people who purchase them. This understanding allows businesses to accurately advertise to meet the customers’ needs and offer relevant promotions and discounts to attract new customers. Moreover, gathering these valuable insights improves the performance of the business and eventually achieves efficiency.

####2. Customer Basket

Expert systems powered by AI uses self-learning algorithms to make new recommendations and offer promotions and discounts. It is impactful in increasing the basket size of individual customers. Furthermore, these algorithms could help customers point out where the items they are looking for are kept, thereby cutting down on waste time and delivering a seamless and engaging environment.

####3. Shopper Experience

Retailers can use cutting-edge AI-based technologies such as video analytics to optimize shopper experience in retail stores in several ways. It can treat customers’ priorities by providing them with personalized offerings and guide them through their needs. Personalized offerings will appeal to the customers’ emotions and will help in building customer and brand loyalty. AI-based technologies can enhance brand loyalty in the eyes of their customers to multiply sales.

####4. Business Strategy

AI-driven management can benefit businesses in multiple ways. Allowing AI to manage preferences will enable enterprises to make smarter decisions, stay ahead of their competition and bring down the waste generated. Integrating AI into your everyday operations can also help you in staying ahead of trends.

The advent of AI has brought about an impeccable change in the management of businesses. In this section, we will see how AI-powered intelligent systems such as video analytics can be helpful in the day-to-day functioning of your retail business to induce greater customer engagement.

Please look at Wobot’s checklists and their importance for a retail business to determine the growth of your brand.

How does Video Analytics Help?

Video analytics is a modern-day technology that uses digital video signals using unique algorithms to automate process compliance. In other words, it is “computers monitoring cameras monitoring tasks”. Here are a few ways in which video analytics helps enhance the in-store engagement of your business:

####1. Safety Measures

Amidst the Covid-19 crisis, ensuring safety and hygiene has become the topmost priority of every individual, starting from retailers to customers. Face masks have become the new normal in today’s time. However, it is not humanly possible to ensure that every customer and staff has worn a face mask in every nook and corner of the store. Video analytics has smoothened this process by enabling face mask detection and other safety protocols such as social distancing and crowd count. It provides the customer with a safe and valuable experience in the store.

####2. Control Crowd Gathering

The Covid-19 pandemic is a severe situation that has made people aware of their hygiene and care. In this scenario, it also becomes the retailers’ job to ensure that their customers are safe by providing them with a safer surrounding and ensuring that their customers follow all safety protocols. The use of video analytics becomes very useful to take care of these as retailers can detect breaches such as crowd gathering faster and better in specific parts of the store and the whole store. It enables the staff to take immediate measures while relying on such data.

####3. Reduce Wait and Queue Time

Video analytics help reduce queue time by taking real-time video footage and detecting and analyzing instantly to identify the precise location of each customer within a certain radius, inherently boosting customer service performance and reducing unnecessary queues. Having an idea about the wait time ensures better engagement as it makes the customers feel valued.

####4. Personalized Targeting

Video analytics can be combined with facial recognition to generate demographic-based data, generating more personalized targeting, thereby delivering more in-store experience. It can further detect the dwell time of customers on a particular shelf generating personalized data for boosting the in-store customer experience. Retailers can then use the data to create density heat maps for more efficient marketing campaigns.

####5. Maximize Store Layout

Retailers can apply video analytics in their stores to maximize store layout and product placement. For instance, electronic shelf labels can be combined with video on the shelf to detect out-of-stock items. This information provides an engaging environment for the customers, thereby delivering greater in-store engagement for them.

####6. Measure Crowd Strength

Video analytics can be used inside stores to measure crowd strength and to determine peak hours. Footfall analysis comes in handy in the retail business as it lets them know when a customer leaves the store without purchasing any product. It further enables the manager to know about the peak hours to schedule the appropriate staff to meet customer demand, thereby increasing the chances of better customer engagement.

####7. Heatmap-Align Staff Placement

Heatmaps track the movement of the customers in the store. It plays a vital role in generating data on the minimum and maximum visited areas of their store. With the understanding of these insights, the store managers can reimagine their promotional strategies and placement of products and staff to serve the customers better.

####8. Security-check

Video analytics is crucial as a security system as it provides powerful tools to security personnel against theft and burglary. It offers assistance such as intrusion detection and camera tampering by which retail businesses can get real-time information on security issues. Further, with video analytics, retailers can get instant notifications on critical threats such as gun detection and instances when the security guards are not present on their respective posts. It improves the store’s security making it more reliable for the customers, thereby increasing their engagement.

Conclusion

Intelligent video analytics converts difficult-to-organize data and automates the step that humans would otherwise take to complete analysis exhaustively into insights, statistics, and ideas using more agile techniques. It not only saves time but also improves efficiency, and businesses can achieve greater operational agility. Thus, it has become a reliable medium in the retail world.

About Wobot.ai

Wobot.ai is your one-stop platform specializing in video analytics in retail stores to enhance the customers’ experience. We believe that intelligent video analytics is the new normal, and with our AI-powered checklists, we aim to deliver efficient process compliance management and customer satisfaction.

Learn to identify, analyze and mitigate process deviations in real-time with video intelligence.

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