Count Your Customers Right: The Top Six Features of a Great People Counting System

2021-12-16

In our previous post about people counting systems, we went through the basics of people counting systems and provided a number of reasons why their in-store presence is crucial for leveraging the most out of your stores in ways you may have never anticipated. 

Assuming you have your business case, selection team, and financials off the table, to which facets of the people counting system you are just evaluating should you pay your attention? 

Well, there is no definite answer to this question as it -- as everything else -- depends on the expectations. However, there are several areas that might become important as your people counting project evolves in time. 

Following is a list of the 6 most essential of them.

6 critical characteristics of a great people counting system 

1. High Accuracy. Distinguish between staff and customers or adults and children.

2. Advanced Applications. Add machine learning and predictive capabilities.

3. Extensibility & Scalability. Make sure to follow the whole customer journey.

4. Privacy Protection. No images of visitors’ faces should be captured.

5. Maintainability. Maintain system quality and a competitive edge.

6. Vendor Quality. Don't overlook the vetting process.

1. High Accuracy

So it is with statistics; no amount of fancy analysis can make up for fundamentally flawed data. Hence the expression garbage in, garbage out.

- Author: Charles Wheelan

Accuracy describes how well a people counting system picks up and counts targets under different environmental conditions and how well the system balances between ‘in’ counts and ‘out’ counts.

More advanced people counting systems are capable of distinguishing between staff and customers, adults and children or groups of people and thus providing really clean customer traffic data.

Striving for close to 100% counting accuracy might make sense in some use cases, however, 95%+ accuracy is much more common and sufficient for the majority of use cases. High accuracy often correlates with a higher price for the sensor, of course.

It's also important to understand that accuracy is usually characteristic of the sensors used in the system and not necessarily the system as a whole. Vendors providing hardware agnostic in-store analytics platforms can support various types of sensors from various vendors and thus give you an additional degree of freedom here.

2. Advanced Applications

While counting people is the essential feature of any people counting system, the same data can be used for so much more than just acquiring insights into the traffic patterns of your customers.

A great and current example of this is that many vendors have started to provide applications for managing the occupancy levels at stores to address the pandemic measures imposed by national governments.

By adding machine learning and predictive capabilities and oftentimes with the help of advanced features of the underlying sensor technology, the people counting system becomes a real powerhouse and a kind of Swiss Army knife of operations management.

Here’s a list of a couple of useful applications that might be available in your vendor’s people counting suite:

• Alerting. While rich reports on the traffic patterns are important, they need to be interpreted by human agents - ie. they require time, labor, and skill. A great people counting system should be able to provide you with real-time alerts on anything unusual, suspicious, or just simply interesting.

• Staff planning. Precise tailoring of the service intensity (number of floor employees per customer) to an actual demand is the holy grail of customer service management. With a little bit of integration with your shift scheduling system, you can create a proper data-driven staff planning machine. This can save a lot of labor and labor expenses.

• Occupancy management. Limiting the number of visitors to the stores has become an important means of safeguarding the health of the visitors as well as employees. It’s also a tedious and costly task if done by humans. And also a task that can be offloaded to people counting system.

• Queue management. Queue management system enables managers or floor staff to prepare for anticipated increases in demand for service areas, based on real-time traffic data. Oftentimes, limits for maximum people waiting in lines or maximum wait times might be set to control the throughput of visitors.

3. Extensibility & Scalability

A great people counting system should also take into account that it won’t stand by itself and will become a part of your ICT ecosystem. Also, it should support you when growing - vertically as well as horizontally.

Extensibility is a system design principle where the implementation takes future growth into consideration. Extensions can be through the addition of new functionality or through modification of existing functionality. 

Your people counting system can support this by providing you with options for how to get more value out of the system by one of the following means:

• API (application programming interface). A de-facto standard for integration of any system into your existing business systems and platforms, such as CRMs, ERPs, business intelligence, and other tools.

• Data exports. APIs are great but need integration effort on your side. Make sure your people counting system enables you to move data from one system to another by using simple data exports. This comes in handy for many purposes such as ad hoc analyses as well as many kinds of ad hoc integrations.

• Custom development. While off-the-shelf solutions are often rich in features, large enterprises tend to have specific needs that might turn out to be essential for the proper functioning of the whole system. In that case, the capability of the vendor to customize the solution might be crucial for the success of the whole project.

Scalability on the other hand is about the quality and volume of the service vendors are able to provide. 

There’s a lot of companies providing simple people counting, however just a few of them are able to collect and use behavioral data that cover the whole physical customer journey. 

Also, the ability to provide the service across whole chains of stores in several countries and time zones might be crucial for many global enterprises.

4. Privacy Protection

Regulations to protect the rights of individuals are being introduced in many countries (eg. GDPR in the EU). That’s a great thing! However, under these laws, collecting personal data becomes a rather sensitive topic. 

Although many of the sensor technology vendors embed privacy protection measures directly onto their devices, the overall data collection and data processing flow might get quite fuzzy. Make sure people tracking sensors used in the solution and the solution itself are GDPR-compliant and respect shopper privacy. No images of visitors’ faces should be captured, no identification of individuals conducted.

Make sure you understand the basic terms that might become a part of the privacy discussion such as “identification”, “anonymization” or “pseudonymization”.

Each serious people counting system vendor should be able to provide upon request with their data protection and privacy policy documentation in which they describe how they process, store and protect the data which is being formed as a part of their service.

5. Maintainability

The world of tech is changing at an accelerating rate. Your people counting system functionality needs not only to keep up with your competition but to keep ahead of them.

When standing against the ever smarter tech-enabled giants you need to ensure that your system is always up to date. Anything less than perfect might have a negative impact on your customers’ loyalty and employee happiness.

Your competition is always there waiting for any mistake you make. Speed of deployment affects your bottom line. 

Maintainability means the ability to maintain the quality of the service in the long run as well as the competitive edge.

Advantages that come with incremental, ongoing changes and deployment are long proven. Continuous improvement (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) are now de facto standard principles across many industries. Any system that supports this model has the advantage over the one that doesn’t.

The other two areas to which you should pay special attention are the state of infrastructure and data quality.

Understanding how the underlying sensor infrastructure functions and changes over its life cycle provides a critical perspective in developing an effective operations and maintenance program that will promote efficiency and reduce operating costs in the long term. 

Make sure the people counting system provides a robust infrastructure monitoring system that is capable of capturing any kind of anomaly that might lead to decreased system performance. 

It should also provide a means of integration with a ticketing system to gain complete transparency.

A decrease in data quality is not always caused by the decrease in function of the infrastructure but also by external factors such as changes in the store layout, obstacles, or sudden changes in behavioral patterns of visitors. A great people counting system should be able to reveal such situations by reporting incidents on data anomalies.

6. Vendor Quality

While not directly a characteristic of the people counting system itself, vendor abilities contribute to the overall service quality and the customer experience in a great way.

Vetting suppliers to ensure that they’re able to fulfill your requirements is thus crucial. It’s a common problem to overlook the vetting process when new suppliers need to be onboarded quickly. 

Here is a couple of tips for vetting your potential people counting system vendor:

• Check on reputation. Figuring out who your supplier’s clients are and what they did for them will help you establish their track record. Ask for direct contact with their former clients. Having this kind of conversation can give you a great sense of whether you want to work with them or not.

• Judge their infrastructure capacity. How is the vendor’s organization set up? Can they support the volumes of services you might need in the time frames you expect? 

• Test supply chain robustness. Is the vendor dependent on a third-party vendor or can they switch to another vendor if necessary? How robust is their approach?

• Ask for the extra value. Sure, establishing your peculiar business case is important but knowing what else can the vendor bring to the table might be quite enlightening. 

Last, but not least, don’t forget that cultural compatibility and fit are also an essential part of a strategic buyer-vendor relationship!