As the retail industry evolves, traditional brick-and-mortar stores are becoming only a small piece of a multifaceted environment. Those shops that remain have begun to change in a way that will please and excite customers who need a unique shopping experience to convince them to visit a brand at a physical venue rather than online. Some retailers are even reimagining their stores as showrooms for consumers to touch and engage with products before purchasing. The transition to custom experience shopping means that loss prevention professionals must learn to navigate a new kind of retail channel management.
Shannon K. Stilwell, CPP, CFE, talks about the transitioning retail environment and the new ways that we must begin to think about analytics in the Strategies column from the July-August 2016 issue of LP Magazine. From the column:
“Traditional LP analytics and even retail analytics have focused more on the physical store activity and specifically point-of-sale (POS) rather than on other key areas within retailers’ organizations. Now with a potential shift from traditional brick-and-mortar stores to showrooms, a need arises for a more holistic analytics platform that looks at more data points within the business: multi-channel or omni-channel POS (mobile devices and shopping apps), supply chain, inventory, customer traffic (virtual and physical), customer insights and wallet share, marketing (social media), and staff-to-customer engagements. And it should all be integrated with the common POS data that is analyzed today.”
Retailers already have a lot of data to manage. The loss prevention division will likely be the one handling analytics programs in order to connect inventory, marketing personalization, fraud detection, and more. Check out “Transitioning Analytics When Stores Become Showrooms” to read the full column. You can also visit the Table of Contents for the July-August 2016 issue or register for a free subscription to the magazine.