Transforming the Retail Landscape With Video Intelligence

Brick-and-mortar retail has stood the test of time, even amid changing markets, evolving customer preferences, and the rise of eCommerce. However, staying competitive comes with a tariff of excellent customer experience, enticing store layouts, and watertight security. At present, the retail industry is facing the disruption of a lifetime, with its volatility having increased by 250% since 2010. Even giants like Walmart aren’t immune to this instability, with its profit margins sitting at 1.82% as of April 2023. With looming fears of a recession due to dropping sales in multiple sectors, retailers need to pull all the stops to remain profitable. The million-dollar question, then, is how? And the answer might just lie in AI-powered video intelligence.

The Foundation of Your Brick-and-Mortar Store Needs

While a lot goes into running a successful store, it can be broken down into a simple formula of exceptional customer experience, minimizing lost opportunities, and cultivating high employee productivity. Without these, a retail store can quickly dwindle and lose customers.

Positive Customer Experiences

Customer experience makes or breaks store success. If customers are happy, they are more likely to return and direct more people to your store through word of mouth. On the flip side, 1 negative experience can take 12 positive experiences to make up for. In fact, customers bank on experience so much that 60% of them are willing to pay more just for a better experience. However, many retail stores still struggle to shape positive customer experiences, leading to cumbersome search experiences, line dropoffs, clunky store layouts, and a poor customer-retailer relationship.

Preventing the Loss of Opportunities

Quick and efficient service is a crucial factor for securing conversions and long-term customers. On the flip-side, sluggish service leads to the loss of customers and, as a result, a loss of opportunities. Among US customers, 25% of them report that they are “much more likely” to walk out of a store without making a purchase if there are long lines. Additionally, 77% of customers are not likely to return to a store where they have experienced long checkout lines. As a result, in the US alone, such losses of opportunities cost retailers $100 billion. Hence, long billing queues,underutilized billing counters, and the resulting wait times are a major challenge for retail stores.

A Productive Workforce

The above two factors cannot be fulfilled without a productive workforce. A retail store has the highest chance of success when its employees consistently attend and adapt to the customer’s needs. To do so, it is important to schedule employee shifts strategically, assign and re-assign tasks throughout the day to match the influx of customers, and be quick and efficient with each task. Even so, retail stores routinely struggle with understaffing and efficient delegation when rush hour comes around.

As markets and industries evolve, it is important that retail businesses keep up and find innovative ways to increase revenues. Wobot AI, an AI-powered video analytics platform, happens to do just that.

Fortify Your Retail Operations With Wobot AI

The retail industry must constantly go through revivals and reinventions to maintain its relevance and elevate its profitability. Over the years, companies have invested billions into their physical stores, ranging from renovations to employee training and technology. Among these investments are camera systems, typically used for security and surveillance.

But what if we told you that your in-store camera systems can be used for much more than that? Wobot AI transforms your existing camera systems into real-time data-gathering entities that deliver insights about store operations, loss prevention, and analytics via a comprehensive and user-friendly dashboard.

By analyzing video streams based on pre-configured rules and checklists, Wobot AI gathers crucial information about paths taken by customers in the store, operational efficiency, and billing events. With this information, you can make data-driven decisions about various operational aspects and proactively tackle threats and shortages.

Here's how Wobot AI helps Increase Customer Conversions and Maximize Profit:

1. Facilitate Pleasant Shopping Experiences

Attentively engage with your customers to elevate their shopping experience with insights into store walk-ins, customer journeys, and dwell times at product displays and checkout counters. Increase the speed of customer service and influence conversions by assisting shoppers with their purchases. Analyze how busy cash registers are and ensure a positive checkout experience by monitoring queue lengths and analyzing wait times to avoid line dropoffs.

2. Optimize Store Layouts

Capture customer interest in products by identifying customer movement and in-store hotspots with heatmaps. Measure zone wise engagements to assess customer engagement with products and leverage this information to optimize product visibility by placing them in specific sections of the store. Utilize insights from the busiest store areas to eliminate bottlenecks, minimize less-trafficked areas, and replicate these improvements at other stores for consistent enhancement across the board.

3. Improve Operational Efficiency

Gain a comprehensive understanding of your store's daily and weekly operations through detailed store analytics. Compare performance across specific time periods or different locations to conduct an efficient post-analysis on customer acquisition effectiveness, thereby improving planning and marketing strategies. Identify peak footfall times to optimize staff schedules effectively and improve operational efficiency.

4. Track Abandonments

Gain insights into instances wherein customers drop their purchase decision due to lengthy billing queues. Line abandonment is a common pain point across the industry more so in Food service like QSRs. Wobot AI's smart detection capabilities help identify such occurrences and enable store managers to intervene at the right time to prevent loss of sale for the Brand.

Step Into the Future With Wobot AI

Video intelligence can greatly benefit the retail industry. However, its potential is still untapped by many. Currently, about 30% of US retailers have plans to implement video analytics in their stores and this number is only going to go up. Be the first few partakers in the next big retail reinvention with Wobot AI and transform the profitability of your physical stores.