As we’ve explored in previous posts, gathering and analyzing customer data is crucial to optimizing your customer experience. You can use key data to improve customer service, improve product placement, improve staff schedules and inventory management, and even use it to design marketing campaigns.
Here, we’re going to tell you how the analysis of one particular type of data, customer footfall, can improve your business user experience by helping you identify your customers’ pain points. Then you can put them right, leading to a much better experience for all.
How does Footfall Analytics work?
Footfall data is becoming increasingly important to a whole range of businesses looking to increase their competitive edge. Retail and mall businesses, theme parks, airports, and automotive dealers are some examples of business types that are benefitting from analyzing footfall data.
To begin with, you need effective technology to accurately count and track people coming through your business. At Xpandretail, we can offer several trusted solutions using different cutting-edge technologies. These include infrared beam sensors, laser sensors, thermal red heat detection sensors, shape recognition technology, and video-based image referencing sensors.
These footfall-counting systems gather a lot of very useful information when deployed over a period of time. Good systems can provide additional bonus information on customer type: new, repeat, or cross-store. With certain bonus features, you can even leverage omnichannel in-store engagement data. All this information can be analyzed, empowering your business to make more effective, evidence-based decisions on a number of key issues. You can more easily understand customer behavior, habits, and pathways. You can analyze not just visitor numbers but also capture and conversion rates.
If you are not just counting numbers through your front door, but also recording how people move about your premises, and even monitoring numbers for those who walk straight past your business, you have a really detailed picture in front of you. Better still, you can use data analytics from this information to make predictions that will help you optimize operational efficiency and provide the best possible customer experience.
5 Key Things About Footfall Analytics
Getting into more detail, here are just a few examples of what footfall analytics can teach you about your business.
1. How many visitors convert into paying customers?
By using footfall counting technology, you are going to know exactly how many people are passing through your doors. Set up the necessary technology and you can even learn how many people show up in each department or how many potential customers pass by your entrance. Now, begin to compare that with your sales data and you are going to have a good idea of what your conversion rate looks like.
A large discrepancy means many lost opportunities. It’s likely that customers aren’t happy about something. Are there long checkout lines? Is it the lack of visible staff to answer questions? Is your product placement causing confusion? Footfall data that tracks customers around your store can give you a good idea of what the problem is. Perhaps your conversion rate varies from day to day or between departments. This can tell you a lot about what’s going on.
The same data gives you information about the success of marketing campaigns. Did your campaign make a difference in conversion rates? More so at certain times than others? Use these insights to plan bigger and better campaigns for next time.
2. Which locations do your customers prefer?
Take all the same information as above and use it to compare locations and find your happiest customers. When you have a unified system, comparing locations is straightforward. Easily find out what is working well in one location and use it to improve performance across all locations. What product placement setups are working best, for instance? What is the optimal ratio for staff to customers to improve conversion rates?
3. Has customer behavior changed over time?
Compare performance snapshots from this week and the same week last year. This should give you really interesting insights into what’s going well and what isn’t. Do you have a higher proportion of happy customers now?
4. When are your peak hours?
Understanding your peak hours means you can best plan stock levels and staffing rotas. This feeds directly into better customer experience and allows you to smooth out problems. Your footfall data will enable you to identify whether your good conversion rates hold up during peak hours, giving you the information you need to best plan for busy times.
5. Is your store layout working for your customers?
Use footfall counting technology to identify hot and cold zones and dwell times in certain areas. Use this information to enhance your layout and improve your customer store journey. Use it to strategically place product promotions and better place staff.
What could you be doing better?
Research shows that the most common customer pain points are: too few staff or poorly located staff; long payment lines; confusing product placement, and stock issues. Footfall analysis can help you remove all these issues for your customers. Data can indicate what’s working well and what isn’t, meaning you can make all the tweaks necessary for optimal customer experiences.
If you are considering using people counting solutions to give your business a competitive edge, find out more by contacting Xpandretail today.