The key to ultimate business success is understanding customer behaviors and shaping experiences. From the moment customers enter your store, their journey begins – with store layout, product placement, available floor staff, marketing campaigns, and queues as the road signals that will define a pleasant trip (or an unpleasant one!). Tracking in-store customer behavior throughout the customer journey gives managers insight into traffic flows, dwell time, customer interests, marketing effectiveness, and how to optimize the experience according to data-driven decisions. Creating memorable customer journeys is easy when you have a Retail Analytics solution that turns data into actionable insight.
What is Retail Analytics?
Using in-store camera sensors integrated with on-demand analytics software, a retail analytics solution gives managers insight into foot traffic, sales, and other customer engagement metrics. With customizable reporting, retailers can separate product performance, marketing strategy, peak performance periods, customer behavior trends, demographic analysis, sales conversion ratios, and just about any other KPI you can think of.
In terms of shaping the customer journey, retail analytics helps managers optimize store layout, marketing campaigns, customer service, and queue management. Here’s how it works.
Optimize Store Layout and Product Placement
In-depth customer behavior analysis enables a retailer to predict customers’ shopping patterns, including when and where they enter the store, how they engage with displays, products, and other touchpoints in the store, and for how long. Identifying dwell zones and traffic flow patterns provides insight into how managers can refine store layout for optimum product and service accessibility and effective cross-sell opportunities that boost brand recognition and maximize sales.
Targeted Marketing Campaigns
3D AI sensor technology, used as part of a retail analytics solution, can distinguish gender and age, allowing retailers to identify their target market. With this information, they can create targeted marketing campaigns with products and messaging that resonates with their predominant demographic. When monitoring the campaigns, you can analyze what works and what doesn’t to create benchmarks for the most effective strategies. These strategies can be replicated or used to inform future campaigns for ongoing success.
Improve Customer Service
The real-time nature of retail analytics means that managers will never miss a beat on customer service. Measuring customer footfall gives managers an indication of the staff and resources required to meet customers’ demands more efficiently. Through customizable alert creation on the analytics dashboard, managers can set up an alert to be sent to staff when the customer count reaches a specific number. Analyses of traffic counts over time provide insight into when the busiest periods are, enabling managers to schedule staff accordingly. Traffic flows can be measured by the hour, day, week, and month to identify peak performance periods to prepare in advance adequately.
Queue Management
One of the biggest hurdles to creating a seamless and positive customer journey is ensuring that customers are not subjected to long waits. Long, slow-moving queues constitute a significant deterrent, and effectively managing them is crucial. Sensors can be placed above the cashier or service areas to measure the queues’ length and the number of times customers are idle in a queue. Alerts can be set up to go off when predetermined metrics regarding queue length and wait time are exceeded for staff to immediately intervene and expedite the process.
In-store screens can also be integrated with your retail analytics solution to display customizable messaging for customers about possible wait times, store occupancy, current promotions, or self-service options available to them. This communication can explain the journey shoppers can take to make it as pleasant as possible.
Vemcount Makes Retail Analytics Easy
Vemcount is a comprehensive retail analytics solution that uses the latest 3D AI sensor technology and an easy-to-use BI analytics dashboard. Vemcount sensors capture detailed and accurate data about customer flow, queue times, traffic patterns, dwell zones, conversion rates, outside traffic, marketing and sales performance, customers’ gender and height, and even social distancing and mask-wearing measurements. You can see all of these details in real-time on the Vemcount dashboard and create custom reports with combined data to glean actionable insights that help you optimize the customer journey.
Send us a message if you’re interested in creating memorable and compelling customer journeys with Vemcount.
