Consumers nowadays are spoilt with frictionless checkout experiences online and are getting increasingly frustrated when they shop at a physical store. The in-store shopping journey is filled with bottlenecks and customers consistently report that completing a purchase is the most painful part of their shopping experience. Given the effort required to get people to the store, no one wants the conversion to fail because the checkout process took too long. Providing a smooth checkout experience can boost customer satisfaction, reduce wait times, and increase the throughput of daily transactions. Above all, the checkout experience leaves customers with the last impression of the brand and is crucial to ensure that customers remain loyal to come back again and again.
As a result, retailers are quickly adopting new tech-enabled strategies that solve this consumer pain point. Here’s a look at how technology can help in providing a faster checkout experience:
Focus on adopting scalable technology
Technology vendors have been partnering closely with retailers to test and validate technologies such as smart carts, self-checkout, RFID checkout or just-walk-out. Ultimately, these are different solutions for the same goal of providing customers and shoppers with fast, smooth, and convenient checkout experiences.
While there is a lot of buzz about these autonomous check-out experiences, most brick-and-mortar retailers are not able to introduce these solutions at scale due to the extremely high capital expenditure required to purchase the hardware.
In addition, most of the solutions are still in their infancy and are resulting in a lot of unintentional shrinkages due to the limitations of the respective software in being able to accurately track every SKU.
Therefore, retailers need to focus on adopting cost-effective technology that can scale and enable efficiencies without having to introduce any new store-level infrastructure. One such technology that can solve most of the immediate problems is computer vision.
The power of computer vision
Computer vision which is a subsect of artificial intelligence (AI), enables operators to unlock a variety of analytics by leveraging their existing CCTV video footage.
Essentially, this technology tracks the movement and behaviour of shoppers across the store and provides operators with an understanding of what the shopping and checkout experience looks like. It will give them insights into how many customers are coming in, where they spent their time, or what the wait times were at the check-out.
Once a retailer understands what the customer conversion funnel looks like in each of their stores, they can use this information to start solving each bottleneck with the goal of delivering the most frictionless check-out experience.
Solving the line-balking dilemma
How often have you walked into a shop, had a look at the line and then immediately walked out? This phenomenon, known as ‘Balking’, occurs when a customer sees a line and abandons the purchase, usually because the size of the queue conveys the message that the wait time is too long.
Stores such as supermarkets that have lots of footfall estimate that they lose up to 4 percent of annual revenue because of this. Therefore, it is essential for the store manager to ensure they have an adequate number of tills open to match the footfall coming in for each hour of the day.
By leveraging computer vision, operators will have insights into metrics such as entries, queue lengths, average wait times and cart abandonment rates at each hour of the day. This information is essential for operators to understand which hours and days of the week their cashiers are stressed the most.
They can then match their labour hours at the tills with the forecasted peak times for their customers — helping them maximize throughput and minimise line balking. Furthermore, if there is a sudden influx of unexpected footfall then the store manager will receive a real-time notification alerting them to open another till.
Driving incremental value
The key to successfully scaling technological innovation is to ensure that the software can not only scale with minimal cost and infrastructure but can also be adopted seamlessly into the day-to-day workflows of the target stakeholders.
The beauty of computer vision is that operators can easily adopt the solution and get a quick return on their investment by focussing on incrementally reducing their line abandonments rates.
Adopting technology such as computer vision helps retailers work towards this key business outcome both in a predictive and real-time manner.
(The author is the Senior Vice President of Strategy & Business Development at Deep North.)
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