An ingenious solution that tracks and analyzes store footfalls to determine customer experience and the conversion ratio of walk-in to sales.

They say, every footfall matters – specially the one that comes close but turns away.

Numbers speak. As per the Retail Traffic Index by Ipsos Retail Performance, in August 2019 dismal numbers appeared for in-store visits as overall footfall numbers dipped by 9.8 per cent compared to August 2018. And, this was six months before the black swan event of COVID-19 hit the world hard. The inherent health scare, coupled with lockdowns, social distancing, and supply chain disruptions, has created a grave conundrum for the retail industry.

Given the depleting numbers of footfalls over the years, the pressure on retailers to sustain or grow the conversion rate is undoubtedly surmounting with each passing day. The silver lining is that as per the industry studies on consumers’ and retailers’ views on what is going well and what is not, nearly half of shoppers showed that helpful shop assistants are encouraging them to spend more time in-store, and over half felt a better shopping experience when shop assistants used technology.

Hence, it becomes even more pertinent for the market leader in the home comfort segment, a flagship retail brand of a $360 million multi-national conglomerate to closely track and analyze footfalls in each store to determine customer experience, the impact of store sales executives, and the eventual conversion ratio of walk-in to sales. Enjoying more than 23% share in the organized mattress market in India, the market leader realized that sheer numbers on spreadsheets would only showcase the end-results, not the insights into a customer’s expressions and sentiment.

The company needed a solution, built with an out-of-the-box thinking, to study walk-in consumer behavior, analyze the effectiveness of store sales executives, display, store’s ambience, and on-ground promotional activities. With the solution, they wanted to identify areas of improvements to significantly fine-tune the brand’s overall efforts to improve customer experience and drive footfall to sales.

Enter, Staqo’s AI-enabled camera powered solution of Store Image Analytics.

Staqo’s AI-enabled camera powered solution of Store Image Analytics

IMAGES TO INSIGHTS

Images redefined how the company’s retail function looked at stores and footfalls in a big way. Staqo put together an indigenously developed video analytics platform built on footages from in-store surveillance cameras. The camera-based system has been powered by Artificial Intelligence and Facial Recognition solutions for granular visitor identification. With superlative image capture, extraction, comparison, matching, and analytics capabilities of the system ensures not only unique faces are being counted to avoid duplication, but also articulate accurate emotion detection and interpretation for the market leader in home comfort products to course-correct its in-store visual merchandizing or staff behavior, if needed.

The AI-enabled cameras have been rolled out to about 300 stores, with plans to expand to all of the 4,000 company showrooms across the country. The results have been pretty encouraging. Thanks to the sturdy analytics of geometry plots and grid comparisons, the intelligence that the team gathered has been radical. On the onset, the store managers have quickly grasped a better handle on managing PoS queues and in-store signages to improve customer experience. Now the store-staff and sales executives are accurately aware of the number of footfalls they got, how many stayed, for how long, and how many walked out without conversions – and why. The company is gaining a better grip on what has been going right and wrong at the last mile.

Apart from a better conversion rate for the stores, their retail team has cracked product-personalization in a big way. With Staqo’s Store Image Analytics solution, the company has a better direction for all the training that sales consultants and outlet managers receive. This has created a massive uptick in enquiries, footfalls and in-store time for customers. It is also helping the company in creating a unique differentiation in the current clutter of online sales-wars.

The insights are also enabling better fund management between sales and marketing campaigns with deeper understanding on performance vis-à-vis derived value of the brand’s Below-the-Line marketing activities, in terms of on-ground activations and promotions to target audience. The analytics is helping the company’s marketing teams to do more what is working and less of what’s not.

Needless to mention, all this sum up on its own as a better top- and bottom-line. The ‘Moment of Truth’ for this industry is being captured spot-on.