The retail apocalypse is wreaking havoc all across the world, with major players closing shops or going out of business. It’s pretty clear that online retail is here to stay. Like it or not, it’s something that Brick and Mortar (B&M) stores just cannot ignore anymore. But that doesn’t mean that B&M’s need to give up altogether. They still have supremacy in some areas like customer experience, they can increase their superiority by using technologies like Facial Recognition (FR). FR can provide retailers the value that they’ve been looking for.
Below are three ways that B&M’s can use FR technology to keep their hold on the market.
Locate anyone, anywhere
This technology can instantly locate and detect all the faces in a specific area. Even if you don’t recognize all the people, just knowing how many there are offers valuable information.
If you can find out how many people come to your store at a time, you can ensure that you have enough employees to cater to them. Even if you don’t hire extra staff, you can optimize staff timings according to the rush hours in your store. You can make sure that when people come to your store, someone is always there to help them out and guide them.
This way you can also determine the busiest days and the busiest times in the store. And the best thing is that this information can be available for you in real time. No need to wait till the end of the week, no more spending hours in front of the CCTV camera and manually tallying the customers. You can get immediate alerts for unexpected rises or declines in customer traffic so you can work accordingly.
Where Oh Where are They Going?
Another way that FR can help you is to show you the movements of customers through your shop. Currently this technology is only available for online retailers as they can observe their clients as they move from page to page. This ability to track their customers gives the online retailers vital information about their clients that they can use to make the client’s visit more comfortable and personalized.
B&M’s can also benefit from this technology and gather the same kind of data. This way you can observe your customers’ movements and find out which areas of your store are getting a lot of attention and which areas are getting none and what to do about it.
I Don’t Buy It….
Another way FR can help you is to tell you in real time what your customers are buying or not buying. Suppose a customer spent a considerable amount of time in one area of the store and didn’t buy anything while another customer went to the area and immediately made a purchase and left. Now you can find out what is the difference between both the customers and make sure that their next visit is more personalized for them. Suppose that a given amount of people visited a part of your store, but at the end of the day there was no purchase from that part of the store. This can help you decide what to do about the products in that part of the store; relocate them, mix them up, or leave them as they are.
Even though the retail apocalypse will continue on its way, it doesn’t mean the end of physical retailers at all. B&M’s can offer customers the kind of experience that online retailers cannot. And although, online retailers can offer a lot of things to their customers, technologies like FR can really help B&M stores close the gap.
