Understanding and acting on customer shopping behaviors is key to unlocking the future of retail.
What are your customers doing in your stores? It is a simple question. The sad truth is that most retailers don’t know what their customers are doing in their stores. Some retailers analyze the POS sales data to gain some insights into their customers. However, this is the last step of the journey. Most retailers don’t have any information about where their customers spent time in the stores, what interested them or rather what did not get their attention.
As we continue our series about the store of the future, retailers need to focus on gaining a better understanding and insight on customers and their needs. If the future of retail is focused on data and knowing one’s customer, understanding customer shopping behaviors is a major part of being a successful retailer.
This is not just about knowing how many people entered your store.
What if you could continuously track, study and analyze customer movements, foot traffic and shopping behaviors in real-time at all of your retail sites? You could learn about walk-by traffic at your store fronts, how many customers visit each store each day by the hour, how often they return, how long they dwell, what areas they engage with, and what their in-store journey looks like. Surely, such rich information could help retailers optimize staffing, store layouts, merchandising displays and the customer experience. Improving in these areas can help maximize customer loyalty and engagement, and ultimately improve sales.
Online retailers have been able to capture customer journey information for quite some time. They can determine what products customers browsed, how much time customers spent researching products, what products were added or removed from their online basket and how often customers return to their site.
Obtaining this information for your physical stores can be a significant challenge. However, without this information, how do you convert visitors to your stores from browsers to buyers? In today’s retail environment, it is critical to understand how well your stores are performing and servicing your customers.
How does a retailer collect such detailed information on in-store behavior at scale? In a perfect world, one might imagine a transparent ceiling at each retail site, with a team of data scientists on top tracking and studying customer behaviors. But this is an expensive and unrealistic proposition at best.
Achieving these insights requires an innovative and scalable solution that can cover needs across retail locations by site and region, and across time by the hour, day, week and month.
Accuvia Software Group is partnering with FastSensor to offer just such a solution that enables retailers to measure customer engagement to improve ROI at scale. The FastSensor platform uses intelligent sensors and software with modern machine learning techniques that continuously track, study and analyze customer behavior in retail settings. By passively and anonymously tracking radio frequencies on personal devices, FastSensor can continuously track over 90% of all customer traffic in great detail and in real time, while remaining globally privacy compliant and responsible. The system is also completely passive, meaning it does not require opt-in or any active effort from customers.
The value in FastSensor’s platform is not just capturing accurate foot traffic for each physical store, but delivering valuable behavioral insights around customer engagement down to specific areas within a store. While it seems complex on the surface, metrics and insights are analyzed and captured in a summarized format that can be easily accessed in an online dashboard.
New technology can be powerful but has the potential for integration challenges. Together ASG and FastSensor solve these challenges by offering a flexible modern architecture that provides data via dashboard, ETL, or API feed.
FastSensor provides key insights into how customers physically interact with your business, from what areas or products they engage with to how often they return. On its own, this level of data and insights on your customers is very exciting. However, it becomes even more powerful when you combine the customer journey data with a broader understanding of the store operation such as purchase, loyalty data and customer sentiment data. It allows you to see your physical store operations holistically and, in a way never before possible.
Accuvia Software Group will be exhibiting at the NRF show in New York in January. Stop by our booth 662 to see the systems foundation that retailers can use to build the store of the future for their specific business with solutions from ASG and our partners FastSensor, TruRating, Infodepth, HP and TSYS.
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