People counting and customer tracking systems allow business managers to gain better insight into how customers behave in their stores and physical locations. However, it is important to wonder if these technologies have a significant impact on the business itself. Yes, people counters provide accurate data on how many people visited a business, but of what use is this data?
Heatmap outlines how visitors move around a store, which sections they visited the most/spent the most time in, and the products they engaged with the most. Very interesting information, but how does it help a drugstore owner boost sales and retain customers?
For the average store owner, shopping mall manager, or casino operator, the most important considerations are improving business operations, boosting customer satisfaction levels, and increasing revenues. Can people counting and customer tracking systems do these things? Find out below:
Essential business metrics are measured using footfall data
Customer counters keep an accurate measure of how many people enter and leave a business location. According to V-Count, a leading provider of customer tracking software, these counters are over 98% accurate. Just by knowing how many visitors they receive daily, businesses can measure essential metrics, e.g., conversion rate, staff/customer ratio, and lost sales opportunities. Managers can also identify their peak and off-peak periods. These metrics measure business performance, and if they are tracked and improved over time, business performance will improve alongside.
For example, store conversion rate tells store manager A how many people visited his store compared to the number of people that made purchases. If 100 people visited and only 20 of them bought something, the store has a conversion rate of 20%. After looking through reports from the store’s customer tracking system (more on that below), manager A found that 15% of visitors left his store because checkout lines were too long. He can work toward solving this problem. Once solved, the conversion rate may increase gradually. A higher conversion rate means more sales and more revenues for the store.
Because of people counting systems, manager A knows how well his store is performing. And due to customer tracking solutions, he can implement strategies to improve performance and make more sales.
Customer behaviour becomes easier to analyze and understand
How do customer tracking systems recognize customer behaviours and trends? And how can the data collected by these systems be analyzed to improve business performance? It is more straightforward than you’d expect.
There is a Queue Management system that tracks queues at checkout counters and reduces cart abandonment. By tracking wait lines, data from the Queue system provides information about how long every customer spends at checkout. Conversely, data from Heatmap technology tells business managers the sections that customers love and the products they interact with the most. It also shows how easy it is for visitors to move around.
Now, when manager A sees that his store’s conversion rate is 20%, he can use the customer tracking systems to find the problem. For example, if the average checkout time in the store is longer than 10 minutes, he knows what the problem is; people are abandoning their shopping because of checkout queues. And if there are no queues? No problem, manager A moves to the next important metric.
Manager A can leverage Heatmap data to see if the store layout is too complicated for people to find their favourite products. Or if the popular sections are too congested and people spend less time there. Less time in the store means fewer selling opportunities and lower revenues. If manager A improves store layout, his conversion rate should increase.
Visitor analytics are leveraged to improve operational performance
Here is the twist: all the analysis above is not done manually by the manager. He doesn’t need to bring out a calculator to measure conversion rate or estimate checkout time. He doesn’t need to look at heatmap video to see if the store layout is too complicated or if there are bottlenecks in the store. All these are done for him by a business reporting tool that collects data from the different customer tracking systems.
V-Count’s Business Intelligence Platform, for example, provides managers with analytics and reports on how well their store is performing. It measures all-important business metrics and outlines where the business is lacking. Every section of the business is analyzed, with reports stating how well they are performing.
Subsequently, reports from the Platform can be used to improve operations. For example, if analytics show that manager A’s store traffic increases from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Mondays. During that period, checkout times rise to 13 minutes, and conversion rates reduce to 12%. This means that the store is struggling with the increase in traffic during the busy hours. Manager A can open up more checkout counters during this time. He can take attendants from one store section and deploy them to the emergency counters. When the next report from the Business Intelligence Platform comes in, he can see how successful this plan of action was and tweak it till it’s optimized.
The Business Intelligence Platform can also be used to track and measure the effectiveness of marketing initiatives. It highlights how weather affects traffic and sales. And managers can set up email notifications for when door count goes above or below a certain threshold.
Conclusion
People counting and customer tracking systems improve business performance by allowing managers to track and optimize the metrics that are most important to their businesses. Additionally, they can highlight the areas where business performance is falling short; thus, allowing them to make changes. When changes are implemented, the systems provide a means to track performance and optimize to perfection continually.