Not just security: how to increase sales for offline retailers using facial recognition technology
The pandemic has been a damaging hit for the offline retail market. The difficult economic situation and high competition forces companies to look for new ways to boost consumer demand. In search of a way out of the crisis, market players rely on improving the IT infrastructure and digitalization. Biometric technologies are becoming one of the growth drivers for the industry. Today we will talk about how and why facial biometrics is used in offline retail.
Table of Contents
- Analyzing your target audience
- Biometrics as a marketing research tool
- Personalize your service to increase sales
- Face recognition technology as a service personalization tool
- Flexible approach
- Targeted Advertising
- New Generation Loyalty System
- Fight against shoplifting
- Biometrics as a tool to combat shoplifting
Analyzing your target audience
International companies spend millions of dollars on marketing research every year. Retailers resort to installing different customer counters, invest in collecting and analyzing information from WI-FI and geodata of mobile operators. But despite all these efforts, the target audience portrait often remains unclear, and requires constant updating.
Biometrics as a marketing research tool
Equipped with a facial recognition system, a video surveillance camera at the store entrance identifies each visitor, which is almost 100% of the brand's offline audience reach. The system automatically detects the client's gender and age, counts the number of unique users and frequency of their returns.
As a result, the store receives a comprehensive report on the target audience and its gender and age statistics. Data on unique visitors and the number of repeated visits will allow you to track the range of customer loyalty over the time of interest and analyze why and at what stage customers may have been lost.
The data obtained using biometrics can also be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a particular advertising campaign: whether it attracted new customers and how it affected the target audience composition.
Personalize your service to increase sales
When it comes to the battle for the customer, the winner is the one who can offer the customer the best quality of service. In online retail, a personalized approach to the customer has long been placed at the center. Companies use monitoring of visited webpages, catching up with emails when the shopping cart is left, personal discounts and promo codes. In offline retail, everything is often still left to sales consultants. But to use a truly individual approach, the employee must know the client well. Can the seller remember all customers? Is he or she is able to predict what might interest the client? Not always. Biometric technologies can fill this gap and bring the seller's communication with the customer to a new level. This becomes the key to increasing sales and the average receipt.
Face recognition technology as a service personalization tool
Flexible approach
A biometric surveillance camera integrated with the CRM system recognizes the buyer from the doorstep and automatically transfers the information to the sales consultant about the client, his purchase history, and those goods or services that might be of interest to him. Instead of the question “can I help you with something”, the targeted offer is “we have new products of your favorite brand, would you like to learn more?” Facial recognition technology will also allow you to identify VIP clients who require a special approach.
Targeted Advertising
This advantage of biometric technology is relevant for those stores or sales offices that have digital advertising or information surfaces. The principle of operation here is similar: identifying the buyer who has approached Digital Signage, the facial recognition device sends data to the CRM system. It gives a command to display advertising content to the client based on their preferences, gender and age. As a result, a fan of sports shoes will learn about a new collection of sneakers, and a handbags lover will not be shown a video about a new men's shaving machine. Targeting ads using biometrics additionally attracts the attention of the target audience and increases the conversion rate of advertising.
New Generation Loyalty System
On average, a large retailer spends millions of dollars annually just for printing loyalty cards. Biometric identification speeds up the service process and makes obtaining privileges for regular customers more convenient. The customer no longer needs to search for the card, tell their phone number to the seller, or wait for an SMS message for verification. The system itself recognizes the customer at the checkout and notifies them of discounts or accumulated points.
Fight against shoplifting
Shoplifting remains one of the biggest problems for retailers. The physical security and the use of conventional VMS does not have a noticeable effect. The number of crimes continues to grow, and shoplifting costs are estimated in the millions.
Biometrics as a tool to combat shoplifting
Enriching surveillance cameras with facial recognition technology allows you to identify the thief already at the store entrance. The security service receives a prompt notification about the presence of a potentially dangerous person on the trading floor. Security guards not only try to detain the person when he has already committed theft, but also start working ahead of time and prevent crimes in a timely manner.
Biometric technologies integrated into the VMS also allow you to speed up the investigation of incidents. A long-term video archive that does not take much disk space ranks the passes of all visitors by date, time, or area of the trading floor. To determine the identity of the shoplifter, the security service no longer needs to spend time viewing hours of video recordings.
Another advantage of biometric technologies in the security systems of offline retail is an increase in the effectiveness of stop lists. This is especially true for online retailers. After all, even if the attacker is well known to the security guards of one retail outlet, nothing prevents him from changing his location and continuing to steal in another store of the network. A centralized database created with the help of facial biometrics makes it impossible for shoplifters to do this and helps prevent theft at all points of sale of the company.
Facial recognition technologies can be successfully applied in stores of both premium and mid-price segments. But despite all the obvious advantages of biometrics, some offline retailers still doubt the need to implement biometric products in their work. Perhaps the main myth is the supposedly complex integration of technology. However, modern biometric solutions do not require either replacing existing cameras in stores, or abandoning the usual CRM systems. Thus, the Id-Target software solution from RecFaces is integrated with leading VMS and does not require a large amount of time spent on installation. The API makes it easy to integrate with any third-party systems. Sales consultants and security guards can get customer information using a simple and intuitive mobile application.
Learn more about Id-Target and other RecFaces products at our free webinars. You can view the schedule of our courses here: https://recfaces.com/training