Store Optimisation with Security System Analytics

Whether they’re queuing for a piping hot sausage roll or trying to pay for clothes shopping at a self-service checkout, the ease with which your customers move around your retail or fast food outlet can have a big impact on profits. Queue too long? The chances are they’ll give up and leave. Bottleneck in the bagging area? A recipe for frustration, or worse.

Fortunately, smart security systems can help you optimise your store layouts with the help of video analytics, which offer powerful insights into customer behaviour and flow.

Footfall analytics

Gone are the days when all you could get from your CCTV system was straightforward surveillance. These days, thanks to AI, smart security systems can analyse video footage and draw out all kinds of insights and data that you can use to make your stores better places to be – ultimately resulting in better service and greater profits.

With footfall analytics, you use your security cameras to monitor – in real time or historically – various data on customer movements, such as how many people are in your store at a particular time, where they go when they’re there and how long they stay in different areas of it. This helps you make improvements to your store layout and staff allocation, helping your store operate more efficiently.

To illustrate the power of store analytics data, let’s look at the example of a fast food restaurant. The fast-paced world of the Quick-Serve Restaurant (QSR) outlet relies on efficiency: the clue’s in the name, after all. If you’re finding your queues are getting out of control, footfall analytics can help with things like:

• Real-time alerts – telling store managers when queue lengths exceed a set person count threshold
• Heatmaps and flow tracking – showing you how customers move around your restaurant, including spotting bottlenecks – so you can see where you might have opportunities to alter table positioning or improve signage to keep people moving
• Analysing dwell times – this can highlight friction points by showing where customers are spending too long in particular parts of the store and whether they’re underusing other areas, such as a particular ordering station or self-service kiosk

This data might show you, for instance, that bottlenecks start building up around 12.10 pm each day, or that 55% of your customers are walking straight past a promotional area. Armed with this knowledge, you can reconfigure store layouts to redistribute customer flows, reduce queue times and allocate customers to staff with greater efficiency.

Retail insights

And the insights don’t end there. Smart security systems can link in with EPOS tills and tell you things like how many people have shopped with you on a particular day, or whether your staffed checkouts are more effective than self-service tills, helping you make informed decisions on the ratio of self-service to traditional checkouts. You can also measure conversion rates by comparing the number of people who entered your store with how many made a purchase.

Along with footfall analytics, this kind of data can help you improve staffing in different areas of your store, stop queues from building up and even improve your in-store marketing by positioning products in the areas where they’re most likely to be noticed.

Tighter security

Finally, whether it’s a QSR outlet or a homeware shop, it goes without saying that smart security systems also help you tighten your security. With real-time video analytics capable of incredibly in-depth insights, you might be surprised by the types of suspicious behaviours you can now spot with your humble CCTV camera.

From loitering to object detection or even someone standing in a specific pose while carrying out a transaction, it’s never been quicker or easier to spot suspicious behaviour while it’s happening – so you can act fast to nip crime in the bud. And with facial recognition enabled, you can even get alerts when known offenders enter the store.

Your security system could be a powerful strategic tool

With the powerful insights that AI has enabled from your security system, technology that was once a matter of simple surveillance is now bringing a host of other benefits in both store optimisation and loss prevention – both of which have a major impact on revenues.

Our own Ai security system, V5, is already revolutionising in-store security and analytics for some of the biggest brands in retail.

To find out more about how it could help transform your stores, get in touch today on 01749 600 600 or send us a message using the link below: