If every click made by a shopper on an online store can be considered valuable information, surely every step taken by a shopper in a physical store is also a similar wealth of data. While clearly this is valuable input that many stores would like to have, the means to collect and process it is not available everywhere. This fact has resulted in a significant gap in the information available in an online as opposed to a physical store.

Can the power of Internet of Everything and real-time analytics bridge this gap? Can it help capture the shopper behaviors using sensors in the store? Can real-time analytics at the edge transform this data into shopper insights?

Yes indeed. While we see the need for granular and enhanced analytics, we clearly see that many physical store retailers are yet to start their journey in capturing such shopper insights. Let's take a 3D view of your shoppers.

You need to gather:

Door Traffic:This is the total traffic coming into your store. This metric is very valuable for understanding loyalty, conversion, staffing needs, and much more use cases as highlighted in the Cisco white paper on Retail Analytics. By filtering new and repeat visitors, we can understand your shopper's loyalty -but when we bring together this data with point of sale data, it helps us to understand conversion. When we correlate this with marketing campaigns, it helps you get a sense of your store's and campaign's effectiveness.

Dwell Time:This is the time that your shoppers are spending in the store and in different areas of the store. It highlights the engagement of shoppers with your products and displays. For example, this metric can be used to understand products that are getting more attention from your shoppers, or can be used to determine more advanced metrics, such as balk rates and predicted wait times.

Demographics:This is the breakdown of segments among your shoppers. The granularity of this data can vary and can provide insights for customer segmentation and the ever changing dynamics of your shoppers, helping you to match shopper preferences and targeted promotions.

While there are no questions about the value of these data to the retailers, achieving it is currently a challenge due to the combination of technologies and sensors required to capture them precisely, effectively, and economically.

The Cisco Connected Analytics for Retail solution focuses on making this journey easier for retailers to capture the data and derive insights. Leveraging Wi-Fi, video, social, PoS, and other sensor data, and bringing together the power of real-time edge analytics, the solution provides retailers a 3D view of their shoppers.

If you are attending Cisco Live 2015 at San Diego, come by to check out the Connected Analytics for Retail solution demo in the World of Solutions pavilion. I look forward to seeing you there!