Analytics : Future of Retail Analytics

The Tutorial / Article talks about Future trends in Retail Analytics and touches upon how customer data in combination with data science can help and how technology can help in finding solutions to few fundamental problems in Retail Industry. 

Based on the unique needs of the customer different strategies are required by the store manager for better engagement. The journey of customer in the store plays an important role in understanding the behavior of customer and by doing this store manager will be able to predict right time to engage with the customer to sell the product. 

Overview of journey of Customer in Store:

Customer Walk In

Demographic presence in store

Engagement

Tendency to Purchase

Buy the product

Problems and Gaps-

The store manager will never know how many customer are dropping at what stage for example if the customer walked into the store and then moved out of store due to poor engagement or due to a long queue for billing.  It’s difficult to find out the actual stage when customer moved out.  Predictive Motion Estimation can help store manager to target customer at right time. 

Do You Know your Customer well? 

Every Customer in the store is different and should be treated in a unique way according to his/her characteristics.  Based on the analysis of the image and motion appropriate engagement methods can be used by putting Customer in one of the following categories. 

Based on the characteristics of customer e.g. Cost Effectiveness, Relationship Building, Adaptability, Generating Revenue Customer can fall in one of the category. 

When Customer is in the store effective way of capturing each and every step of customer including the sentiments is by video Analysis of Customer. 

Real time analysis of Product which were picked but not sold can be done by capturing the images of products which were out of shelf or in the hands of customer. 

Technologies which can be implemented to process the images captured through camera

1) Computer Vision–It’s a broad field which includes conversion of high dimensional real world images into numeric or symbolic information which can be analyzed and processed to get insights. 

2) Video Tracking– Process of locating a moving object over time using camera

3) Object Recognition– Process of Finding Humans where they are located in store and based on their demographics in the store heat maps can be used for better resource allocation. 

To make life of store manager hassle free a good Dashboard with rich information can convert a bad day to a good one. 

Top 5 Products chart will help to analyze which products are sold more frequently

Conversion Rate Weekly will help us to determine how many customers entered into the store and how many have purchased the product. 

Predictive Motion Estimation- As soon as customer enters the store and takes 2 to 3 steps customer can be tagged as one of the three categories based on image captured through camera and then processed result can help in determining predictive motion of the customer. 

In case customer is tagged as GEN X Customer he/she will be taking blue path specified in the dashboard.