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Smart surveillance technology is able to provide video data and enable retailers to better understand shopping habits and optimize business operations while offering more than just a security or health safety tool.Hartmut Schaper, CEO
FREMONT, CA: Retailers across the world are cautiously reopening their doors after the most challenging times in decades, while in some areas, the toughest times may still lie ahead. This uncertainty is creating complex challenges for retailers, who are looking to make smart investments in technology that will not become outdated once health and safety guidelines and restrictions lifted.
With this in mind, Security & Safety Things (S&ST) maps out a few ways in which smart surveillance technology can support both short-term reopening measures and offer additional long-term benefits to retailers. The benefits include optimizing inventory in stores and warehouses, increasing sales conversions, enhancing customer experience, and streamlining workflows.
Video analytic applications optimize operations by analyzing customer behavior and providing actionable insights to retail management. By evaluating the number of time customers spend in a store, managers can better plan for high traffic periods. With this, retailers are able to measure the additional amount of time customers might stay in a shop, enabling them to plan for potential bottlenecks. This also enables retailers to implement other measures to streamline the shopping experience for customers.
Retailers today have concentrated on implementing technologies to mitigate risk from the ongoing pandemic. These cameras can be armed and re-equipped flexibly with many video analytics applications and are repurposed to fit the most pressing needs of a business. Retail stores today have found themselves in uncharted territory and would have welcomed if there had been a way for their security cameras to address these new challenges. Where safety and security measures are required, smart cameras with intelligent video analytics can assist in notifying proper personnel about potential safety hazards, and immediately notify staff if a customer has fallen. When added object detection, the cameras can identify damaged goods in the warehouse and manage inventory to prevent theft.
A security camera, which was previously providing video data, can now enable retailers to better understand their customers and optimize business operations.
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