How will in store analytics revolutionize customer experience ?
While e-commerce has completely changed how customers shop on a daily basis, retailers are starting to use cutting-edge technology to get more accurate and detailed customer insight. On the Web, brands and companies can track every click and see how their customers interact with the product. They can also know how long they stay on a webpage, mesure how many people change their minds while buying a product and so on… Nowadays, brick-and-mortar stores do not get as much insight as the online sales channels.
You probably even heard that e-commerce is a threat to brick-and-mortar stores. People would rather shop from the comfort of their home. Retailers are under pressure to keep shoppers coming into their stores and buying there. They need to create more interactive and immersive shopping experiences.
They need to find the answer to this question:
“What makes people want to come to a store?”
The answer is: Customer experience
To do so, retailers need more customer insight. They need to be able to identify metrics which will allow them to have tangible data to define what kind of customer experience they are actually offering and what leverages they have at their disposal to improve it.
Why is customer experience so important?
It seems obvious for businesses to focus on customer experience. However, some businesses fail to understand that added-value does not only come from the product or service provided. Customer experience is all about the buyer’s journey that leads to the moment he will decide to purchase the item or service. The product or service in itself is important of course, however this customer journey is as crucial for businesses. Customer experience is also about what happens after the purchase. It follows the whole customer lifecycle and caters to his needs and much more.
The customer will search for products or services that will offer an extra added value at the very beginning of his interaction with a brand.
It is an intricate and complex process that should include every touchpoint the customer encounters. A customer will come to store because he will access added-value exclusive to the brick-and-mortar shop such as live events (product demo, exclusive discount, contact with staff for extra tips, overall atmosphere, exclusive products…).
Why not just order everything on the Web ? What initiatives can businesses take to lure customers into their stores? For example, the Japanese brand Muji sells very simple products. It promote a minimalist lifestyle and offers anything from a toothbrush to furniture. Products are very simple, so why go to the store? The shopping experience. Muji stores in Japan have cafes which provides homemade and cheap food in the store. All stores have a « creative station » which allows shoppers customize their Muji stationary with colorful stamps. Another great example of exceptional customer experience, are the Apple concept stores which offer co-working spaces and a cafe to transform the store into the place to be.
But, how do you decide where to put the cafe ? Where is the best place to put the creative station? How do you take that decision? Of course, there is the trial and error method but this can take quite some time. Therefore, in store analytics is the most cost-saving and time saving solution for retailers to take the best decisions possible to improve their customer experience.
Did you know about in store analytics?
Based on computer vision technology, retailers can finally access to more data about their customers, how they interact with the store and products! Basically, they will have a better understanding of the customer experience and its different components (staff interaction, merchandising, …). Retailers will get to see trends regarding their merchandising strategy and obtain accurate analytics on where people are going thanks to heat-maps and other data.
This means, retailers will have the means to create new strategies for their stores, and target more precisely their audience. Smart cameras gather anonymous information about the customers such as their gender, age range as well as their exact location in the store and when.
Space management
Thanks to this technology, retailers will be able to measure how efficient their space management is.
This will give a whole new perspective on the merchandising strategy to store owners. For example, if there is in-store event, what is the impact on the customer flow ? Thanks to a heat-map, they can measure traffic just like on a website. How many people came to your event ? How many just passed by and did not stop ? Why didn’t they stop ? Was it because of the way the products were presented?
What kind of profile did those customers have? Retailers will be able to study their targeted customers efficiently depending on the exact location of the store, not only relying on studies and intelligence from the brand’s headquarters. They will have the means to create the best customer experience for a given segment.
This opens a wide array of business opportunities for retailers but also for mall managers. Space management wise, mall managers will have more leverage to negotiate prices of different locations. And on the store’s side, when renting out a space, they will know exactly how many people usually go by the location and at what moment of the day/week/year before choosing where to open a store. Mall managers will also be able to understand how people move in the building and take decisions accordingly.
Where is the best place to install a directory? Where should an event take place depending of the shopper’s profile ? Is shopper traffic smooth enough or are some locations cluttered? How do people respond to advertisement? What kind of shop performs best?
Optimizing the supply chain
In the long run, retailers using in-store analytics solutions will see trends emerge from the data they collect. Therefore, inventory management will become much more easier as the they will be able to predict more easily the flow of customers likely to come on certain dates or moments of the day.
The shopper’s profile (with gender and age range) will help retailers anticipate their needs in inventory. They will be able to match more easily products with a type of profile and adjust their order accordingly. If a profile is more common stores will be able to get a better idea of who is coming and when, which drastically improves the overall market intelligence and supply chain management.
Optimizing the potential of frontline managers
Retail managers spend up to half of their time doing administrative tasks and going to meetings. They spend little to no time inside the store, and lack overall tools to have control over key indicators. When they have at their disposal some monitoring tools, they spend too much time creating reports. AI can help automatize the monitoring and offer a great user-friendly platform to follow key indicators like the number of people in the store, the conversion rate, effect of a Marketing operations. This makes reporting to headquarters much easier. Thus, make much more time for managers to focus on customer experience and identify the adequate KPIs. They have more time to spend for staff, training and other tasks that can significantly improve overall customer experience.
What about privacy?
This a question often brought up today. Who never had a friend telling the story of how google is spying on him and he is having ads from his last purchases haunting him on his computer and mobile screen. Ads can be invasive. And most honestly, it is complete understandable that the consumer is worried about how this new tool will effect his interaction with stores. Moreover the cultural depiction of AI contributes to the idea it can only be detrimental to the human existence. The direction AI creators are taking is not to mimic the human behavior but to understand it and create new business opportunities. AI in in-store analytics is just gathering information any individual can obtain by looking at another individual (your gender, approximate age, current location). The difference is that AI will see, collect all of the information at the same time and then provides trends. No personal information such as photos, names, addresses are kept without the consent of the shopper.
Do you want to know more about Wassa?
Wassa is an innovative digital agency expert in Indoor Location and Computer Vision. Whether you are looking to help your customers to find their way in a building, enhance the user experience of your products, collect data about your customers or analyze the human traffic and behavior in a location, our Innovation Lab brings scientific expertise to design the most adapted solution to your goals.
Wassa’s Innovation Lab created its own in-store analytics solution or shopping malls and retailers: Dencity.
If you want to to know more about this solution, you should visit: dencity.io
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