How to significantly reduce the cost of store occupancy reporting?

Live occupancy is a necessity now

One of the biggest challenges that retailers face are questions over safety and the steps they are taking to create a safe shopping environment. As stores welcome shoppers back, the focus is now to manage social distancing inside stores, this has created a new need for many retailers, a need to know store occupancy at any given time. As it currently stands security guards are being given the task of live occupancy reporting, but in a time where inexpensive technology is available at our fingertips, there is no excuse to be manually counting occupancy.

Manual counting costs too much

Staff costs make up the majority of expenses for most retailers, as a result many retailers are seeking to reduce their overall costs by reducing their workforce. We have spoken with businesses that were on course to spend an additional $150,000 per store, simply by adding security guards to entrances. Real-time occupancy using your existing security cameras can cost a fraction of the price. The investment is paid for in days from cost saving.

What's more, you do not need to install new specialist cameras to this. It simply does not make sense to save money on not employing a security guard to stand at the entrance, to just go splash the saving on installing stereo cameras in your stores. It make a lot more sense to use the cameras that are already installed in your stores. Put simply, as long as you have a camera facing your entrances you can do live occupancy reporting!

Not only can we provide live occupancy counts with your existing cameras, we can also provide a demographic analysis of customers, segment staff from customers and gather both operational and behavioural insights into your stores. All this can be achieved without spending a penny on new cameras.

Manual counting wastes valuable data

Data collected manually has a very short lifetime and often disappears nearly as quickly as it is gathered. Knowing real time occupancy has value in itself but to be truly beneficial the data should be flowing into various other tools and analytics. To be truly effective occupancy reporting should inform a system of alerts to staff when maximum occupancy threshold so they can react as and when needed. This can also feed into digital screens outside or within your store to let associates and shoppers know how occupied the store or area of the store is. This data can even be fed into apps so shoppers can know before they even venture to your store. Occupancy data should also do more than look backward or just inform the present state. It should be feed into algorithms that can then predict future traffic and occupancy. This will empower retailers to make intelligent staffing decisions and helping customers choose the best time to visit stores.

Learn more about more about Aura Visions Live Occupancy Tracking here

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