Posted on Sunday, August 29th, 2021 | 1,204 views
It is well know that security cameras are an important layer of security when it comes to tracking customers and reducing loss. These types of features have been a staple of business security systems for a few decades now.
With the passage of time has also come great advances in monitoring technology. One of those advancements is tracking customer movement.
Using the keen eye of the camera along with sophisticated sensors and high-quality software, you can keep track of customer movement in a variety of ways and for an array of different reasons.
Occupancy Monitoring
In some cases, it’s important to monitor the total occupancy count of a room or building. Occupancy tracking cameras help:
- Maintain safe occupancy levels.
- Save lives in the event of an emergency.
- Prevent consumer frustration with crowded areas.
- Helps people follow safety procedures in health crises such as COVID-19.
With this type of camera, you can set it to alert you when store occupancy has reached maximum levels. This allows you to manage traffic within the building in a safe and efficient manner.
Here’s a full breakdown of the benefits of occupancy monitoring, and how it can benefit your business.
Industries that Benefit from Occupancy Monitoring
This list of industries that can benefit from occupancy monitoring include but are not limited to: retail stores, malls, venues, schools, hospitals, and bars or pubs.
Crowd & Capacity Monitoring
Crowd gathering seems similar to occupancy tracking, but it’s actually very different.
Occupancy tracking keeps tabs on how many people are in the building or room, but crowd monitoring detection captures a specific location and sends alerts if too many people are gathered in that one location.
Crowd monitoring is especially important for keeping people safe and helps:
- Clear of emergency exits.
- Avoiding stampedes through entrances and exits.
- Keeping people safe and organized in massive buildings.
- Ensures the occupancy policies for a specific location are being observed.
Industries that Benefit from Crowd Monitoring
This list of industries that can benefit from crowd monitoring include but are not limited to: convention centres, malls, subway systems, sporting venues, hospitals, retail properties, and entertainment venues.
People Counting & Tracking Sensor Cameras
People counting technology allows you to target specific areas of a location, and count how many people go through that area throughout the day.
People counting technologies are incredibly useful for reorganizing your workspace, maximizing profits, and increasing customer satisfaction. They help get an accurate tally of how much foot traffic your business receives every day.
Ceiling-mounted People Counters
The most common use of ceiling-mounted people counters is in cases where store owners want to know how many people visit their shop over the course of a day. They may need numbers as to when their peak hours of activity are and when people are usually leaving.
Being able to calculate when people typically enter or leave can be very useful for businesses that need to monitor specific peak hours, such as lunch and dinner time. It helps resolve problems with bottlenecks at the door when patrons are coming and going.
While people countering cameras are usually used at the door, they’re beneficial in other locations too. For example, some businesses use them in normal walking areas to create a steady flow of foot traffic throughout the entire building.
Advanced Heat Mapping Cameras
Many security cameras are outfitted with thermal-image processing abilities which anonymously collect data on customer movements.
With heat mapping you can generate a thermal image of a specific area that shows high levels of heat over the course of a specified time frame.
Example:
- Hot areas (indicated with red, orange and yellow) indicate high levels of traffic and grouping.
- Cold areas (indicated with blue and green) indicate low levels of traffic and grouping.
Video Heat Map Monitoring Can Increase ROI
You can use the information collected by heat maps to gauge the effectiveness of your layout, your appeal to certain demographics and to sell your best products faster.
For example, in a clothing store you may want to see which areas gets the most attention. You may see that the men’s clothing section has high levels of foot traffic, but the children’s shoe area is being mostly ignored.
This information could indicate that your store doesn’t do well with a young demographic and has a stronger standing with men. It could also indicate that the children’s shoe section is poorly placed within the layout of the store.
All this information can help you make better decisions when it comes to product placement and telling you why certain products are selling more than others.
Retail Queue Management
If there’s one area of any business that experiences the most frustration from both customers and employees due to customer movement, it’s the queue.
Whether it’s a line for the cashier at a grocery store, tickets for a show, paperwork for the DMV, or the entrance to a theme park ride, nearly every physical business in existence uses at least one queue.
Properly managing a queue system is tricky, but it’s made much easier with a queue monitoring system. See why queue management technology reduces waiting times.
A queue monitoring camera system will monitor:
- The number of people in queue.
- Cashier presence.
- Average dwell time.
- Average service time.
- Abandonment rate.
The main benefits of queue monitoring are being able to keep track of customer wait times, and how many people are typically in the queue.
If the wait time extends beyond the set parameters, an alert will be dispatched. Once alerted, you can open a new queue lane, assign assistance for clogged queues, and create a better plan to avoid queue problems in the future.
These are just some of the options available utilizing queue monitoring cameras for queue management.