Turn retail traffic data into actionable insights

Originally published Nov 2016 | SMB, Digitalisation, IoT | 3-min read

“Running a retail business means being kept on one’s toes at all times. We are constantly making decisions to increase visitors, attract the right crowd, optimise manpower allocation and encourage sales conversion. Making these decisions used to depend on manual tracking, staff observations, past sales records and gut feel,” said Mr Lee.

Besides pulling quantitative data from sales reports, Mr Lee also used to visit his stores frequently to gather qualitative data. “Our store supervisors often attribute lacklustre sales performance to bad foot traffic. As we could not verify these observations or measure the effectiveness of promotional campaigns and product placements, we just have to trust them,” explained Mr Lee. It was evident that this way of ‘fact gathering’ was not ideal as sales performance could be affected by other parameters such as product mix, staff experience, product knowledge and more.

When he decided to rebrand the single-label Artbox, which targeted mainly school-going children, to the multi-label Klosh to target customers from ages 20s to 40s, Mr Lee subscribed to Singtel M2M Video Analytics to turn traditional security surveillance into actionable intelligence. “With Singtel M2M Video Analytics, we can now make use of the images recorded from surveillance cameras to get real-time data on people counting, crowd density, audience profiling, face indexing and other parameters, which we can use to analyse and base our decisions on,” said Mr Lee.

Manpower planning is an area that has gotten a big boost since the deployment of the solution in 2015. “We are able to look at store traffic to optimise our manpower allocation, while upholding customer service levels,” said Mr Lee. This is crucial in managing staff cost while maximising sales at the stores on weekends, public holidays and during festive seasons.

Real-time analytics on crowd density also helps Mr Lee to understand the specific areas in his stores that attract more activity and visitors than others. This empowers better merchandising decisions, while optimising store layout and product placement to capture the desired store traffic.

With new information on customer demographics and buying preferences, Klosh can now design more effective marketing campaigns to target their customers better. “From the data, we see that more than 75% of Artbox’s customers are young females. We can now tweak our product mix to also capture other market segments such as the male crowd and families,” said Mr Lee.

Face indexing, which studies the customers’ facial expressions, allows Mr Lee to know how ‘happy’ his customers are at the point of purchase. “There were instances when a change of the store supervisor created a jump in the percentage of ‘happy’ customers from 5 – 6% to 30%! That is how powerful data is,” beamed Mr Lee.

Perhaps, the newfound ability to manage his business at his fingertips drives home the message of how technology can truly empower one’s business. “With technology, one can be a ‘smart business’ even with a very lean outfit. Leveraging technology innovatively will go a long way to enhance one’s business to increase efficiency, agility and consistency,” said Mr Lee.