4 Ways Crowd Management Can Positively Impact Business Outcomes
The Crowd Management Challenge
No one likes overcrowded venues and long lines. For this reason, management and security teams across diverse industries want to understand more about the way that people interact with the property they oversee. To this end, video surveillance has replaced anecdotal evidence, but traditional video surveillance requires manual observation, which is time-consuming, prone to error, and unrealistic for large buildings or sprawling venues. Furthermore, video surveillance alone cannot truly support crowd management and compliance efforts.
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Challenge Accepted
The answer to these challenges? Video analytics software. Video analytics is breaking crowd management out of cyclical reactivity by empowering management teams with the proactive technology needed to improve customer satisfaction and safety, enhance operations, and drive commercial value.
Video analytics increases the effectivity of video surveillance assets with their robust crowd management algorithms. For instance, these algorithms enable users to track building occupancy counts in real-time, and over time, to prevent crowding or long queues.
Powered by Deep Learning and artificial intelligence (AI) video analytics can detect, extract, and classify all objects in video footage in order to report or “count” the number of people that are in a camera view or have passed through a pre-defined point. Management teams can improve their situational awareness by receiving notifications via real-time alerts for when pre-set thresholds for occupancy or traffic have been exceeded. Furthermore, they can review historical data regarding the number of people who passed through an area over a period of days, weeks, or months.
Let’s dig into the 4 ways crowd management can impact business outcomes:
- Reduce crowds and long queues
To make sure that facilities, stores, or public areas are not crowded, managers must be aware when the number of people in an area exceeds a specific threshold. Video content analysis systems can be configured to detect pre-defined anomalies based on benchmarked traffic patterns and can count people in an area to increase occupancy awareness.
Long queues at checkout counters or ticketing windows negatively impact the customer experience. Identifying growing queues early on means managers can deploy additional staff once they receive an alert or create signage to help redirect consumers under utilized registers.
- Manage building occupancy
Private companies and public institutions are increasingly required ensure safety by monitoring the number of people in a space and complying with occupancy regulations. The counts can be aggregated across multiple cameras in a network, or even across multiple sites, so that property managers can know how many people have entered and exited a building in a particular time frame. For example, public schools and college campuses have gymnasiums and auditoriums that seat hundreds of people; security and operations teams benefit by knowing whether those spaces have reached maximum capacity.
- Plan facility maintenance
When it comes to negative customer experiences, dirty facilities are right up there with long queues. Because most maintenance is scheduled based on time, even the most exceptional maintenance professionals can see their efforts tanked after an unexpected rush. Video analytics enables data-driven, staff management with customizable parameters that trigger real-time cleaning alerts after a certain number of people have entered a restroom, empowering staff to focus their efforts and resources based on usage patterns.
- Gather long-term data
Video analytics also empowers users to transform their video data into intelligence dashboards and reports that make it easier to identify patterns and trends. Managers can then leverage the qualitative and quantitative data to make informed decisions about scheduling, staff zoning, and/or services. For example, management teams need to know how many people utilize their facilities; a transit agency may want to know how many people utilize a particular subway stop on an hourly, daily, or weekly basis. Similarly, a retail store manager may want to know how many customers entered the store and which percentage of them entered a dressing room to try on clothing.
Positive Business Impact with Crowd Management
Crowd Management is just one of the many ways that video analytics software helps management teams derive and track critical business intelligence. From marketing and customer service to operations and physical security, the ability to manage the flow of on-site traffic is critical for better decision-making, real-time response, and strategic planning.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in September 2020, and has been refreshed and updated for accuracy
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