[Am-info] Video System Tracks Customer Behavior

[Fred A. Miller]

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This is intrusive, boys and girls.....a beginning of "NASTY" stuff to 
come!

Fred

Video System Tracks Customer Behavior

With the wide array of clickstream data-analysis tools 
available today, online stores can tell who comes to their Web 
site, what products they look at, how long they stay, which 
promotions they respond to, what they buy, and how many
leave without making a purchase. Brick-and-mortar retailers, 
however, are largely limited to analyzing transaction data, 
leaving them in the dark when it comes to understanding their 
customers' shopping experience.

This week, at the National Retail Federation conference in New 
York, startup Brickstream Corp. will unveil video technology 
and business-intelligence software for tracking customer 
behavior in stores and banks. The system will help retailers 
determine what parts of a store get the most traffic, what
displays shoppers look at and respond to, how quickly they're 
served by employees, and how many walk out without making a 
purchase. Video cameras discreetly record customers' movements 
as they shop or wait in line. The video is fed into computers 
where Brickstream software, using what the company describes as 
"patented image-understanding algorithms," creates time logs 
based on the video. Those time logs, in turn, are analyzed with 
Brickstream Intelligence For Service and Brickstream 
Intelligence For Marketing applications. The tapes and 
collected information aren't linked to the identities of 
individual customers.

While simpler video systems are available for counting people 
as they enter a store, the Brickstream system is the most 
sophisticated use of video yet for gathering business 
intelligence, says AMR Research analyst Pete Abell. But he
says Brickstream's analytical applications are still in their 
infancy. "They'll need more applications that will put hard 
dollars into the retailer's or [merchandise] supplier's 
pocket," he says. Brickstream is developing a third app
for analyzing space utilization.

The technology is available now. Its cost depends on the size 
of the implementation, including the number of stores and the 
number of cameras. A two-year contract for a system to monitor 
checkout lines, for example, would cost from $25,000 to 
$50,000. - Rick Whiting

For more information, see:
Pumping Up Retail
http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eFf50Bce7K0V20ZMz0Ar

Heavy Investment In CRM Predicted From Financial Institutions
http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eFf50Bce7K0V20BVUJ0AF

- -- 
Fred A. Miller
Systems Administrator
Cornell Univ. Press Services
fm@cupserv.org

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