Data analytics - the power to see more

CCTV systems are used extensively for general surveillance purposes and as a deterrent to shop lifters and staff that steal.  There is no question that they have a marked effect on the level of crime but to what extent CCTV alone contributes to its  overall reduction is hard to determine given the plethora of security measures often deployed at the same time.

Despite the success of CCTV and security systems generally the level of crime in UK retail stores remains arguably the highest in the world with shrinkage consistently well in excess of 2% of total sales retail sales.  As a consequence CCTV is a reluctant purchase and in some respects it is easy to see why.  Despite the huge investment already made theft still remains at unacceptably high levels.  The retailers response typically has been to limit expenditure of security adding the cost of shrinkage to the total sales price of the product it sells.

For many years CCTV solution providers have sought to maximise the use of CCTV by making it a management aid.  Though there have been modest successes in this area these have largely failed to capture the imagination of either Operations or Marketing and few new product innovations have materialised.

ipCCTVcameras is at the forefront of innovative IP solutions for retail clients and through the astute use of both IP camera/server technology and new video and data analytics software they are able to deliver CCTV systems that provide genuine commercial benefits and an attractive return on investment that has hitherto been unattainable.

What ipCCTVcameras can do.

ipCCTVcameras deliver the following intelligent solutions for retailers and banks:

• Dynamic Queue Management Solutions

• Customer Segmentation Analysis

• Customer Activity Analysis

• Customer Traffic Analysis including tracking and counting

• Linkage with Customer Loyalty systems

• Indexed Activity and Security Recording

• Fraud Analytics

For the first time CCTV can be used as a genuine management tool for all aspects of retail businesses.  Marketing, Operations and Security can all benefit from the use of intelligent analytic software solutions to improve market intelligence, improve customer service whilst optimising manpower levels.  Whilst achieving this stores can also benefit from:

·          Improved utilisation of almost all legacy CCTV systems

·          Enhancement of legacy systems with new IP camera technology giving numerous other business and performance benefits

·          Access to live and recorded video by authorised personnel for general surveillance and security either locally or at any point in the network

·          Real time digital recording of a high priority events and time lapse recording of all other activity, whether behaviour type or security related

·          Security costs may be absorbed within the operations and marketing budget

How does the ipCCTVcameras Solution work?

Traditional security and market research relies on humans watching a video monitor, walking around a store or monitoring behaviour of customers with a clip board.  In practise using either of these methods it is impossible to keep the human eye focused on every interesting scenario.  Whilst video surveillance goes a long way in streamlining this process for security, it has been impractical to utilise cameras in support of strategic or operational functions.

But what if computers could unobtrusively analyse or ‘mine’ all video 24 x 7 extracting behavioural statistics and sending alerts whenever immediate operational response is needed? This is now attainable through VideoMining solutions offered by ipCCTVcameras.

VideoMining provides key insights about the effectiveness of customer service, space design, merchandising, and marketing efforts.  Its demographic segmentation capabilities deliver data crucial to innovative customer-centred business strategies.  With automatic and continuous monitoring, VideoMining empowers businesses to immediately address operational issues such as queue overflow, or attempted theft.

Customer Traffic

VideoMining’s Customer Traffic product goes way beyond traditional footfall entrance counts that use beams and rudimentary video sensors at store entrances. Using ceiling mounted conventional CCTV or IP cameras VideoMining delivers statistics about direction, speed of travel and complex traffic patterns.

By comparing traffic trends by time and location results and key insights for improvements in space planning, marketing and operations can be achieved.    Since VideoMining can determine traffic at any location within a store, not just entrances, it can determine penetration and conversion rates at department level not just store level. Understanding traffic patterns also impacts on security planning and crowd management which has particular applications in large supermarkets, departments stores, shopping centres and airport terminals.

Since VideoMining can determine traffic at any location within a branch, not just entrances. It can determine:

·          Where customers go within a branch

·          How space is space is used within a branch

·          How long customers stay in any given location

·          What visibility is achieved for signage within a branch

·          What literature is collected from any given location and by whom  

The accumulation of such data can help to determine insights into penetration and conversion rates at department level within a branch and helps to improve branch layout and design and may even help with branch location issues.

A typical branch requirement might include footfall analysis within a branch.  A VideoMining System will:

·          Count every person entering the branch

·          Count every person leaving the branch

·          Maintain a real-time figure of all persons within the branch

·          Exclude loitering at the branch entrance that might otherwise skew statistics generated by the system

Statistics produced by VideoMining will include the following:

·          Number of people entering branch in 5 minute increments throughout the working day

·          Number of people leaving the branch in 5 minute increments throughout the working day

·          Average number of visitors within the branch in 5 minute increments within the working day

·          VideoMining enables banks to ‘factor in’ provision for actual staff numbers within each branch when compiling statistics. The system shall exclude small children, and children in pushchairs

VideoMining can consolidate data from all branches within the estate.  Reports on branch performance are available through browser software. Reports are available on the following:

·          Individual Branch

·          Groups of branches based upon customer defined filters such as:

o         Branch numbers

o         Regions

o         Postal districts

o         Bank Types based on size, demographic profiles etc

Customer Activity

Understanding how customers interact within an environment is crucial for strategic decision-making.

Whether the interaction is with signage, product or staff, uncovering customer activity patterns provides a crucial piece of the customer intelligence puzzle.  Traditional customer activity insights have been based upon broad assumptions or small sample studies but there is no substitute from knowing what is actually happening on-site.

VideoMining provides unprecedented access to knowledge and empowers business to fine tune their merchandising, customer service and marketing strategies based on proven data.  Studies that empower retails might include:

·         Purchase behaviour in response to signage

·         Dwell time in front of signage or product prior to purchase

·         Purchasing behaviour when buying two adjacent products

·         Wait time in queue prior to abandonment of queue

·         Purchase behaviour relative to wait time

·         Purchase behaviour relative to customer traffic

·         Store traffic relative to passing traffic outside a store

All these variables can be linked to demographic data such that patterns in behaviour with different segments can be obtained.

Customer Segmentation

VideoMining removes the guesswork from customer segmentation providing unparalleled view into customer composition with its unique customer sensing technology.

Faced with eroding market share and elusive customer loyalty today’s businesses must divide and conquer – matching their offerings to the specific needs of different customer segments.  With demographic and geographic trends changing at an extraordinary rate its no longer sufficient to rely on census or other archived data.  Furthermore commissioned research is both expensive and limited by time.  VideoMining’s non intrusive method of collecting demographic information, often using existing CCTV cameras, is the ideal solution delivering gender, age and ethnicity data without identifying individuals.  VideoMining is not a facial recognition system.

Collected at different data gather points throughout a branch, segment data together with traffic data can be consolidated and used to calculate the following:

·          Conversion rates for particular demographics

·          Calculation to measure effectiveness of

·          Linkage of demographic data to products purchased

·          Statistics that highlight traffic by volume and traffic patterns within the ranch between alternative demographic segments according to time of day and day of week and date

Future use of the demographic data includes the targeted use of digital signage at prospects matching specific segment profiles.

Queue Management

Providing a high level of customer service is always almost at odds with maintaining optimal staffing levels.  VideoMining delivers customer demand and staffing statistics overtime to help businesses strike this delicate balance.

The cornerstone of customer service is identifying and diffusing issues quickly and efficiently.  This is particularly important at the point of sale and in banks where issues with wait time or service can often mean loss of a customer or a negative attitude towards a brand.

VideoMining’s Queue Management combines continuous monitoring and analysis of the queue with real time alert capability to help businesses find that ideal blend of staffing and service levels.  Keeping constant tabs on queue length, average wait time in queue and abandonment rates, queue management delivers real time alerts whenever potential service or staffing levels arise.  A typical solution will achieve the following:

·          Calculate the number of teller windows open at any given time through human activity behavior- not through manual interface such as push button

·          Calculate the average time to process customers over a defined period of time to be decided)

·          Measure the length of queue for window tellers (one queue to multiple windows)

·          Measure the length of queue for greeter or customer services

·          Measure the queue for automated machines

·          Measure abandonment rates in queues for Window tellers, automated machines and customers services

·          Given actual number of people in the queue, forecast total actual time based on historical data, ‘windows open’ status of queue and forecast average wait time in queue     determine if branch KPI can be achieved

·          In response to the above activate RF pager (final output device to be decided)

Loss Prevention and Data Analytics

The analysis of retail transaction data (TLog) to identify fraudulent activity by staff is becoming more common amongst many tier 1 and tier 2 retailers. However such solutions generally require data analysis following overnight polling and consolidation and cleaning  of data.  VideoMining offers a comprehensive data analytical function that operates locally from data exported from each back office server.  Analytical software within their standard software analyses transaction data and subsequently identifies unusual patterns of cahier behaviour.

All subsequent activity with a given profile performed corresponding to an automatically defined alert condition / profile is recorded by cameras corresponding with each POS position together with all associated transaction data.

Recorded activity can subsequently be view locally or remotely be audit personnel.

Video Recording

Harnessing advanced detection technologies, VideoMining monitors video streams and provides real-time alerts for over 100 events including security breaches and potential hazards triggered by the activity type alone i.e. motion detection in specific areas and specific times or through external triggers and alarm signals.   Each event is indexed by activity type and may be then used for recovery of video evidence by appropriate personnel.  Within a security context video evidence will be archived for all security breaches, manually activated recording in response to a security / potential shop lifting event or any transaction performed by an operating matching a specific profile.

Management of Data

VideoMining provides retailers with insights into their customer never before experienced.  However the true benefit of this data can only be realised in a large estate if centralised and automated consolidation and interpretation of the data can be achieved in a simple and meaningful way.  The data is visually represented on planograms, displayed in PDF format for each branch or clusters of branches with similar layouts.  These highly sophisticated tools are available in addition to more traditional graphical tools supplied with VideoMining as standard.

The mapping solution provides authorised users to the following data through a browser interface:

·          Displays PDF layouts for every branch

·          Visually interprets transaction data accessed through either SAP, SQL, Oracle or Informix databases visualises data according to predefined rules prescribed by the bank 

·          Highlights hot spots and cold spots of human traffic within every branch

·          Illustrates concentration of traffic by demographic segmentation on graphic maps

·          Dynamically illustrated the number of people within queues in any given branch

·          Highlights alert status within any branch (queue management)

·          Provides an intelligent switcher interface to enable live camera selection via a browser from a plan of any camera at any branch within the network through selected hardware manufacturer’s switcher equipment.  This later solution makes a significant contribution to improved compliance with security, health and safety, operations and marketing initiatives

·          Provides simple access to stored digital images of ‘views’  for every location within every branch within an estate

·          Provides a unique management solution for store signage (digital and printed) facilitating the administration and despatch of printed media.  The latter contributes significantly to accurate and targeted picking of posters for each branch, improved compliance with marketing campaigns and reduced printing costs and wastage.

Conclusion

VideoMining offers bankers the opportunity to gather essential data needed to attain competitive advantage through better use of legacy systems and new IP camera technology. Whereas previous systems and methods of gathering data are spasmodic and highly subjective VideoMining solutions operate across an entire estate and are totally objective giving accurate and highly reliable results in real time.

Implementation of VideoMining solutions is simple and surprisingly inexpensive. Contact ipCCTVcameras for further details for further details.