July 2 2015
With Nedap’s Retail Analytics, retailers can permanently reduce losses, optimize stock levels and increase the performance of individual stores by giving detailed insight into the behavior of their staff members, customers and loss prevention systems.
Here are ten ways you can use Nedap Retail Analytics to keep an eye on the details and address any security or performance threats as soon as they occur.
- Make sure your loss prevention system is working properly. The Retail Analytics dashboard can show you the health of your overall system, including smart deactivators, gates, and customer counters. For example, if your employees muted the systems because of too many alarms, you need to be aware of that fact and be able to act upon it right away.
- Get an overview on your real-time alarms. Retail Analytics lets store managers gain more insights on the number (and causes) of RF and RFID alarms, attention button alarms that have been manually triggered by an employee, or cases of metal detection events in your store. This way, you as a loss prevention / store manager can assess which problems to tackle first.
- Control of your system when needed. Retail Analytics allows you to control your EAS system by testing or snoozing the alarm based on special circumstances in your store at a certain moment or a particular time period, as well as placing your system in temporary maintenance mode while you address the issue at hand.
- Get an accurate assessment of your theft risk. With an intelligent loss prevention system, you can distinguish between incoming, outgoing and non-directional alarms. This allows you to register the events without artificially raising your theft risk.
- Identify Peak Hours and Dwell Time. You can use your dashboard and the data from your visitor counters to identify peak and dwell times within the past week. Analysing your visitors dwell time analytics enables you to reduce wait times as you can predict how long people will need when they are shopping. It also lets you draw conclusions about their shopping intentions: a leisurely stroll through the aisles on Saturday afternoon suggests more browsing through different aisles and the potential for large sales, for larger sales, while people who have to run a quick errand before work on a Thursday morning, efficiency is key.
- Effectively plan your staff. Based on the peak hour and dwell time insights, you can now plan your staff accordingly. For example, if your peak hour is at noon and the average dwell time is 45 minutes, having lunch hour at 11:30 AM instead of 1 PM will result in a more pleasant shopping experience for your customers. This also allows you to save of staff overhead for off-peak hours resulting in happier (less bored) employees and overall customer satisfaction.
- Measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Another way to use your visitor intelligence is to measure the effectiveness of certain marketing campaigns. For example, if you have a special or discount running for a limited time during the day, you can measure if the number of customers spiked during these hours and compare it to the same day and time on previous weeks. This creates an easy & fast benchmark to compare performance of last week, last month and last year.
- Dive deeper into real-time alarms. Being able to give a reason why the alarm has been activated (e.g., bad deactivated label motivates employees to act on the alarm and makes your overall loss prevention efforts more effective.
- Identify theft risk exists per gate. Based on the data your intelligent article surveillance system collects, you can identify gates with a higher theft occurrences. Armed with that knowledge, you can place additional security personnel at that specific gate.
- Increase the effectiveness of your EAS solutions. Constantly blaring alarms can scare away customers. But instead of turning off the power of your security gates to get a break, you can use your retail analytics to figure out how to alleviate the situation all together and so over time reduce the number of fake alarms and therefore improve the performance of your system.
Conclusion
Retail Analytics is a vital part of managing your global retail stores. Not only does it allow you to prioritize which store to focus on first, but it also gives critical information to measure the effectiveness of your loss prevention and marketing campaigns.
Head of Product Management
Hilbert Dijkstra
