By Nigel Ashman, President, ONVU Retail
POS transactions are on the end point of the customer journey, followed only by customer reviews or surveys. For years, retailers have used this rich, purchase-related data to help craft better sales strategies and more targeted marketing—and with great success. Still, in a world where video monitoring in the retail space is becoming more intelligent, there’s massive opportunity for store managers to combine transaction reporting with video surveillance and analytics.
Integrating information from the POS with data you get from intelligent video technology transforms just about all aspects of retail operations and oversight because it allows users to comprehensively see all sides of a situation and take appropriate action. It takes the guesswork out of any investigation.
Traditionally, video surveillance and POS were two completely separate operating systems. In order to correlate footage associated with a particular transaction, LP personnel or store management needed to manually gather video evidence, which could take hours and multiple employees.
“With powerful search capabilities and the ability to instantly gain more situational awareness around customer transactions, there are some real hands-on benefits to POS and video surveillance integration.”
What’s more, no longer do they have to be on-site to review captured footage. Imagine monitoring POS activity across any number of locations with the added ability to view camera feeds both live and retrospectively—and from a single device, mobile or not. Integrating video surveillance platforms with POS transactional information brings all data together, so multiple users can quickly access evidence across numerous POS systems from various store locations simultaneously.
With close collaboration between the video solution provider and the retailer, this intelligent POS integration can often be presented in a customised dashboard, where management can search transaction-related information and immediately access video in a centralised manner, rather than only at an individual store level. In essence, users will be able to review critical POS data company wide, and find certain examples or patterns in a larger pool of data using analytics and filtering options.
With powerful search capabilities and the ability to instantly gain more situational awareness around customer transactions, there are some real hands-on benefits to POS and video surveillance integration.
Customer Satisfaction Tool
Instead of just responding to a customer’s comment or concern without knowing the full picture, video integration with POS becomes an essential tool for being more responsive to a customer’s review. Retailers will be able to easily access and evaluate video clips to get the entire story; they can identify and solve problems with the appropriate response quickly and competently.
Purchase Ins and Outs
As touched on previously, purchase data tells retailers a lot about customers. By connecting specific purchases to the associated video when it occurred, it becomes extremely useful to analyse behaviour and determine shopping preferences, impulse conversions, merchandising failures, etc. It’s a no-brainer; track shopping trends with greater insight and improve sales.
Another layer to this is the ability to potentially forecast future sales. By targeting when a customer made a specific purchase and correlating that to whether or not the same individual purchased that item again, stores can track demand and better plan inventory.
What’s Working on the Floor?
With integrated video data, companies can easily review the purchases of items that were a part of a recent marketing campaign or strategic merchandising display. Did sales increase for an item that was being featured? Did the marketing push fall flat unexpectedly? Being able to instantly pull up a visual representation of the customer-product journey can provide answers and insights that may have otherwise gone unidentified.
Proactive Loss Prevention
Every transaction and employee interaction are available to review with POS integration, which creates LP oversight that goes beyond traditional retail theft and shrinkage monitoring. The investigative capabilities with an integrated video system will help find signs of theft amongst a host of transactional and video data. With set parameters to enable advanced video analytics, management can intelligently track fraudulent transactions and monitor suspicious exceptions such as discounts, coupons, voids and returns—a streamlined solution that mitigates risk efficiently.
Transforming Visibility with Added Intelligence
While most retailers today realise that a video security solution is crucial for all areas of daily operations, recent advancements in smart video solutions are scaling up business intelligence and creating unprecedented opportunities to learn more about customers. POS and video data integration opens up the investigative possibilities of searching on the video surveillance system from any device at any time, empowering retailers to better identify, track and analyse transaction-related activity.
