The overlooked potential of AI-powered video analytics in enhancing customer experiences and strengthening retail bottomline.
That said, enhanced security is not the only benefit of AI-powered surveillance and analytics. These systems also empower retail businesses to strengthen their revenues and bottomline. Here’s now.
AI-powered Surveillance in Retail: Going Beyond Security to Customer-centric Operations
Customer-centric retailers put customers at the center of the business and build long-term relationships with them. They strive to understand customers’ needs and then meet these needs with relevant, personalized products, services, and offers. They also aim to provide each customer with the best possible experience throughout their journey.
Advanced, AI-powered surveillance tools play a vital role in creating a customer-centric retail business. These tools provide real-time coverage of the shop floor, allowing retail managers to study customers and their activities. They can review shopping behaviors and spend trends to understand customers better, comprehend their needs, and implement strategies to meet those needs. All of these are hallmarks of successful, customer- centric retail organizations.
AI-driven Insights for Improved Customer Journeys
Customer-centric surveillance systems provide real-time and comprehensive information about customers that allow retail management to better understand, connect with, guide, and serve them. They can see the number of people entering the store, where they go within the premises, where they spend the most time, and how long they wait in line at the payment counters.
Decision-makers can analyze all this information to unpack behavioral insights and understand if certain customer behaviors are unfavorable to the business. For example, if too many customers are leaving without completing a purchase, it may be affecting the store’s sales. The surveillance system will provide insights about such “leakages” that help decision-makers to identify the root cause and determine suitable action to plug them. By doing so, they can improve customer journeys, enhance their experiences, and increase the store’s sales and revenues.
AI-driven Surveillance and Insights: Personalized Experiences, Customer Loyalty, Higher Spends
AI-powered surveillance systems incorporate advanced technologies to generate key insights about shoppers and their purchases. Retail business owners, managers, and staff can use these insights to identify returning customers, and improve their understanding of these buyers’ past purchases, preferences, and shopping behaviors.
With these insights, they can understand these customers better and provide personalized recommendations to them. For example, if a shopper is known to have purchased women’s clothing of a certain style and of a particular size on her past five visits to the store, sales staff can recommend clothing that match these parameters. By doing so, they can provide personalized shopping experiences that impress and flatter customers, and encourage them to come back to the store. Personalized experiences also boost customer satisfaction, happiness, and most importantly, brand loyalty, which then translates into repeat purchases higher spends per purchase, and more sales, revenues, and profits for the business.
Detailed customer insights also create new opportunities for cross-sells and upsells. Knowledge of what customers like and prefer empowers sales reps to suggest additional or complementary purchases. The recommendations are tailored to each shopper and based on their previous shopping history , so they are more likely to appreciate and act on the suggestions, which again increases the store’s sales and strengthens its bottomline.
The system can also be integrated with the business’ digital or e-commerce systems in order to gather useful information about customers, such as their demographics, behavioral attributes, purchase history, and touchpoint preferences. It can then analyze these data points to generate insights that can help retail businesses to further streamline customer experiences – both in-store and online.
Learn More About the Benefits of AI-powered Surveillance for Your Retail Business
When it comes to the retail industry, the value of AI-powered surveillance systems goes beyond security. As we have seen, the best systems can also help your retail business to improve customer journeys, deliver personalized customer experiences, and increase sales and revenues.
Want to know more about the potential of AI-powered surveillance to build a customer-centric retail business? watch Convergint MEA’s webinar Redefining Surveillance for Malls & Retailers: From a Cost Center to a Revenue Generator.
