Analytics in Action: Optimizing Retail Properties with Data-Driven Insight

Retailer getting data-driven insight into customer shopping patterns

Data-Driven Insights with Video Analytics

In recent years, the retail sector has emerged as a significant adopter of advanced video analytics technology that was traditionally siloed in security and law enforcement. As retailers become increasingly data-driven, they’re turning to AI-powered solutions like BriefCam to gain deeper insights into customer behavior and optimize every aspect of their business.

Value Beyond Security

The retail industry has long understood the importance of data aggregation, employing various technologies to understand shopping habits, trends, and footfall analytics. However, legacy systems that leverage sensors and Wi-Fi have limitations. Sensor-based systems, for instance, may count the same person multiple times, while Wi-Fi tracking misses key customer demographics without smartphones. To put it in perspective, in many suburban areas, the prevalent demographic at a mall is families with children. Therefore, if you rely on wi-fi sensors for your demographic data, you are missing out on 25% – 30% of the mall’s population because children are unaccounted for.

The Platform Value

This is where video analytics platforms like BriefCam are making a significant impact. BriefCam’s platform approach to analytics offers retailers a comprehensive solution that goes beyond traditional security applications. While it still provides crucial security features in forensic capabilities and real-time alerting that critically support shrinkage prevention, the platform’s true value lies in its business intelligence tools and dashboarding capabilities.

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A Business Intelligence Case Study

One of BriefCam’s largest retail customers utilizes an impressive 300 dashboards, demonstrating the depth and breadth of insights available. These dashboards provide rich, actionable data that retailers are using in innovative and creative ways to drive business decisions. Let’s explore how this customer and other malls and retailers can use video analytics for data-driven insight:

1. Unique Visitor Insight

One way this customer uses BriefCam’s technology is for unique visitor insights. By using pseudonymization techniques, BriefCam assigns a unique value to each face it detects, ensuring that repeat visitors are only counted once. This approach delivers more precise data without compromising privacy, as no personally identifiable information (PII) is collected.

BriefCam’s technology can also distinguish between new and repeat customers, offering valuable insights into customer loyalty and the effectiveness of marketing strategies. The system can refine the data further by configuring rules to exclude staff members, security personnel, and other non-customer individuals from the count.

2. Customer Movement Insight

Secondly, because BriefCam is capable of more than simple counting, this user also leverages our platform to gain insight into visitor movement patterns, identify hotspots within their stores, and compare performance across multiple locations. This level of granular, multi-site analysis is simply not possible with traditional edge-based analytics systems, which are typically limited to two or three analytics per camera.

3. New Tenant Insight

On a larger scale, mall property developers are using BriefCam to gather footfall data and mall occupancy data to attract new tenants to their premises. By using data-backed intelligence, the decision to lease a space, open a branch of a bank, and more within the mall is no longer based on guess work and intuition. By using BriefCam as a data aggregator, malls can use an investment traditionally used for security as a revenue generator by attracting new tenants into their properties.

4. Insight Across Multiple Locations

Finally, for retail property developers managing multiple locations, BriefCam’s platform offers the ability to compare key performance indicators (KPIs) across different sites. This bird’s-eye view of operations across an entire portfolio is invaluable for strategic decision-making and resource allocation.

Data-Driven is the Future of Retail

As retailers continue to seek more sophisticated ways to understand their customers and optimize their operations, video analytics platforms like BriefCam are set to play an increasingly crucial role. By providing accurate, comprehensive, and actionable insights, these technologies are not just enhancing security and loss prevention – they’re revolutionizing the way retailers understand and respond to customer behavior. As video analytics technology continues to evolve, we can expect to see even more innovative applications that will reshape the retail landscape and enhance the shopping experience for customers worldwide.