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6 Reasons Why Your Retail Business Needs to Invest in Computer Vision
Kathleen Siddell
It’s no secret that the pandemic changed the way people shop. While the popularity of online shopping has continued to increase, e-commerce still only accounts for 14.8% of total retail sales. In-person shopping at brick-and-mortar stores is still alive and well.
Bobby Marhamat, CEO of Raydiant, the leading in-location experience platform, recently told Forbes magazine, “People want to see, touch, and feel the brand. It isn’t just about the online experience anymore.” He says brick-and-mortar stores continue to be popular because “during the pandemic…75% of people were changing brands because everything felt commoditized.” This presents huge opportunities for retailers.
Although there are countless stores selling t-shirts, shoes, body lotions, or whatever you sell, your product is distinct. It’s why you entered the market. You have a product with a unique selling proposition. Believing in your product drives everything you do. As the retail market continues to grow, you need to be taking advantage of every opportunity to distinguish your product and brand from the competition.
Loyalty rewards programs, digital signage, and special promotions are great for fostering brand loyalty. But building an exceptional in-store experience – where your unique products shine – will be a true differentiator.
Retailers are looking to technology to give them this competitive edge. However, not all retail tech is created equally. To get the greatest ROI, retailers need computer vision.
Build an Exceptional Customer Experience with Computer Vision
Computer vision is a segment of AI that uses deep learning algorithms to interpret the physical world through existing cameras. Computer vision AI solutions detect and interpret objects, people, and events and provide real-time data about those detections.
For retailers, this can include everything from counting customers in the store to tracking dwell time (how long a customer looks at products), to monitoring foot traffic to optimizing store layout. Computer vision allows you to see beyond what your hired staff can see to provide a better customer experience.
Because most retailers already have camera systems to prevent theft and monitor activity, equipping them with computer vision applications is unobtrusive. Computer vision for retail can provide far more than just security footage and eliminates the need to sift through video footage retroactively.
alwaysAI video analytics provide real-time data so you can transform your business. Here are 6 ways the retail industry is leveraging the power of computer vision to super-charge your video analytics.
How Is Computer Vision Used for Brick-and-Mortar Retailers?
Most retail stores already rely on video footage for security, safety, or training purposes. alwaysAI Smart Retail transforms your video footage into powerful AI video analytics. Current video footage requires a human to sift through footage to find patterns or outliers and is often only reviewed if there’s been a problem.
Powering your cameras with computer vision software turns video footage into a gold mine of information about your business operations and the behavior of customers in-store. With this data, you can automate tedious tasks and make better business decisions in real-time.
For example, video analytics can inform you of which shelves to restock promptly, your product placement’s effectiveness, and how aisles should be configured to best accommodate store traffic. If an action or data can be captured visually, computer vision can analyze it and provide actionable insights in real-time.
Investing in computer vision solutions translates into improved customer experience, robust inventory tracking, and innovative store design and planning. Computer vision applications can also help retail stores increase revenue and better manage costs via pattern-based predictions.
6 Ways Computer Vision Creates an Exceptional Customer Experience in Retail Stores
Computer vision is the most dynamic AI for retail because of its extensive use cases. With the real-time insights AI video analytics provide, you can engineer the look and feel of your retail store to meet the needs of your customers. Most importantly, video analytics solutions help you catch in-store blindspots, optimize foot traffic and staffing, reduce costs and boost ROI.
Here are six ways video analytics with alwaysAI Smart Retail can optimize your retail store experience:
1. Get Real-Time Patron Counting and Foot Traffic Analytics
Understanding how many customers are in store is a fundamental data point for retailers but too often, retailers don’t have this information. Moving an employee to the front to count patrons entering and exiting is expensive and not always accurate.
Equipping your existing cameras with alwaysAI Smart Retail is a game changer. Not only do you get accurate results about occupancy counts but you get this data in real-time so you can make better business decisions as situations in the store evolve.
alwaysAI Smart Retail can also be used to track customers in-store so you get real-time data about where customers go and which products they stop to interact with. This information can improve store layout and help you accurately identify hot zones.
2. Improve Speed of Service
The video analytics garnered from computer vision can improve speed of service in a couple of ways. First, computer vision can accurately detect the number of people in a queue and estimate the wait time. When 70% of retail customers say they will abandon a purchase after 5 minutes of waiting, this real-time information is significant.
alwaysAI Smart Retail can provide immediate alerts when wait times exceed a certain threshold. Managers can then open more checkouts or move staff from the floor to help at registers. Computer vision can also be trained to monitor inventory and send alerts so shelves can be quickly restocked. Customers don’t have to ask for assistance or be disappointed by empty shelves.
Just as website data metrics can help provide a more personalized online shopping experience, video analytics can replicate this kind of information in-stores. Computer vision can monitor dwell time to understand which products customers linger in front of, which items they pick up, and which they return to shelves. With this information, retailers can optimize store design and layout, placing popular products in easy-to-reach locations.
3. Use Frictionless Checkout
alwaysAI Smart Retail computer vision solutions give you the ability to eliminate the checkout line entirely with frictionless shopping. Using advanced object detection and image recognition applications, computer vision allows retailers to identify products without having to individually scan each item. With more and more retailers moving to self-checkout options, customers demand quick and hassle-free checkouts.
By 2029, the projected market size for frictionless checkout is set to reach $1.1 billion. Adopting frictionless capabilities with computer vision will give your customers a better shopping experience, boost ROI and ensure you have a competitive edge.
alwaysAI allows customers to place all their items on the checkout tray – in any order – for immediate recognition without barcodes for a truly seamless experience. Reduce average transaction times to less than 25 seconds for 5 or less items to keep customers happy. With 99.9% item accuracy, retailers can reduce the need for active attendants.
4. Better Address Labor Shortages
One of the biggest issues facing all employers is growing labor shortages. Consulting firm Korn Ferry found that by 2030, there will be a global human talent shortage of more than 85 million people. Automation will be a key factor in addressing these issues. Computer vision can help. For example, instead of manually counting customers, or over-staffing checkout registers, computer vision can automate these tasks.
Tracking metrics such as occupancy counts, foot traffic and wait times can help managers optimize staffing during peak (and off-peak hours). With real-time video analytics, managers can make quick decisions based on what’s happening in store, as it happens, making critical adjustments as necessary.
Computer vision also provides data-driven insights into the most effective ways to organize and display items on shelves to deliver the best customer experience. With computer vision, retailers can anticipate, prepare for and allocate more staff to specific areas of the floor where products tend to be in higher demand and shelves are emptied much faster.
5. Protect Customer Privacy
As you collect facial and other types of private data from your retail customers, it is critical to respect and safeguard privacy rights. Facial blurring applications like those offered by alwaysAI address those privacy concerns while still allowing you to generate actionable retail insights.
Importantly, computer vision applications deployed with alwaysAI make it easy to preserve privacy. alwaysAI Smart Retail can be deployed to the edge, the cloud or to an on-premise server, without sacrificing security. Whether you use computer vision to track in-store metrics or store operations, facial blurring and the encryption of data ensure that the privacy of your customers and employees is never at risk.
6. Supercharge Your Existing Camera Infrastructure
When you integrate computer vision applications into your existing brick-and-mortar analytics infrastructure, you will rapidly improve the effectiveness of your business intelligence.
You might be thinking computer vision is too expensive or too challenging to implement. However, integrating intelligent video analytics into your existing cameras is easy with alwaysAI. Adopting our platform vs. building one in-house accelerates your time to deployment by eliminating the complexity and long development timelines often associated with computer vision. You can either leverage your existing IT teams and developers or leave it to us.
The alwaysAI platform provides you with everything you need to take your computer vision project from start to finish (along with machine learning experts who will help meet your unique business needs). Best of all, the computer vision solutions offered by alwaysAI can be connected to any infrastructure currently operating on IoT, cloud, or edge devices, avoiding the prohibitive costs of brand-new implementations.
Intelligent video analytics also augment the existing security infrastructure you have installed in your retail store, providing you with greater visibility over all the events that take place. Computer vision can prevent the loss of merchandise by monitoring and flagging unusual behavior while tracking items as they leave shelves.
Using object detection and tracking techniques, you can accurately identify products being handled by customers and track those items to determine if they follow typical behavior like being placed in a cart or carried to the checkout line.
Unlike the traditional manual video analytics that requires designated security staff to review footage after an event has occurred, computer vision provides real-time data and alerts. Applications can be trained to detect exactly what you need to make better business decisions.
How to Get Started with Intelligent Video Analytics
For many companies, computer vision applications can be challenging to adopt, especially if they have little to no expertise in operating or managing AI-driven video analytics technology.
However, this should not be the case. alwaysAI simplifies integrating computer vision into your existing camera infrastructure, making it easy to get started immediately with AI video analytics.
We also understand the ROI implications of adopting a cost-effective computer vision solution. Our intelligent video analytics solutions are best-in-class and can be deployed quickly, saving you time and money while helping you generate more revenue from robust data-driven insights.
To learn more about alwaysAI and our intelligent video analytics solutions, speak with an AI Expert today.