There are several kinds of retail solutions available in the market today. One among them, is the analytics solution.
There are several kinds of retail solutions available in the market today. One among them, is the analytics solution.
You can’t manage what you don’t measure – that’s the reasoning behind the use of analytics. And perhaps nobody knows this better than the people behind FLIR’s Brickstream product line. Speaking to a&s International, Adam Agress, Global Director of Sales, People Counting at FLIR Systems, gave examples on how analytics are increasingly becoming an inevitable part of retail.
“Sales conversion rate is an excellent store performance metric. In simple terms, it is the number of transactions divided by the number of customers who entered the store,” Agress said. “This essentially tells you how successful you are in converting a shopper into someone who buys products. You can usually get the number of transactions from the POS system and you can get the number of people who enter the store from a traffic counting device like the ones that we manufacture. The conversion rate is a better measure of success than revenue alone because it takes opportunity into account.”
The example above isn’t just limited to specialty retailers. The company and its partner community have also been engaged with large retailers and grocers whose stores operate multiple checkout lanes. These retailers and supermarkets are using Brickstream products to understand how many customers are waiting in the checkout lanes as well as how long they have been waiting. These metrics are fed to a real-time dashboard that uses current employee utilization, store occupancy, and historic trends to predict how many checkout lanes should be open now as well as in the future.”
Iacopo Carreras, CEO of Uhopper, another company that tries to understand customer behavior in stores, pointed out that one of the main trends in the coming years would be increased prevalence of tracking and understanding customers in a store.