RetailNext Unveils Video and Mobile Innovations for In-Store Analytics at NRF 2012

NEW YORK, Jan. 16, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- RetailNext, the in-store analytics leader, today announced that it will reveal groundbreaking technology innovations to extend the quality and completeness of captured data and to ensure greater availability and accessibility of business intelligence to retail executives.  The company made the announcement from the National Retail Federation (NRF) 2012 Conference, Booth #2903, where the RetailNext team is demonstrating major new areas of functionality.

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RetailNext enables retailers and manufacturers to improve the customer experience, increase sales, and reduce costs by providing real-time data access, unmatched analytics and reporting, and expert consulting to better measure and understand in-store shopper behavior. The company's  RetailNext real-time store monitoring solution presents data in several automatic, intuitive views, connecting traffic, dwell times, and other shopper behaviors to actual sales at the register—and ultimately giving brick-and-mortar retailers visibility akin to what online analytics deliver to e-commerce.

The new upcoming functionality extends the data available to RetailNext by offering:

• Full-Path Analysis – Industry-first ability to track video of each customer's movement through stores of all sizes, using any standard camera in a truly scalable fashion.  Full-path analysis deepens the insights available by connecting all in-store activities into a comprehensive data set and makes entirely new discoveries available (such as the total duration of each store visit, store-wide heat maps, or most common paths through the store).
• Automatic Demographic Classification – New recognition technology categorizes store visitors as male or female with very high accuracy, adding this critical piece of demographic data to all aspects of shopper analysis.
• Unique Visitor Tagging – RetailNext now accepts input from Wi-Fi smartphones to persistently identify unique store visitors across one or more visits.  This new functionality combines with video interpretation to provide more detailed mapping of movement within the store.  Furthermore, it gives merchants the ability to understand how customers interact with the store over multiple visits or with multiple branches of the same chain.
• Employee/Shopper Differentiation – Merchants can now optionally add small Wi-Fi-based employee tags to their installations, making it possible for the system to accurately differentiate the roles of those moving through the retail environment.  This capability provides further accuracy to traffic counting and enables advanced analytics such as measurement of engagement time between employees and shoppers or comparison of employee distribution throughout the store with that of customers.  This solution surpasses the previous practice of using RFID tracking with a considerably more cost-effective and easier to install platform.

Additional new functionality that makes store performance data more available includes:

• Mobile Application – The new mobile application for smartphones and tablets on the Apple and Android platforms puts the power of RetailNext in the hands of employees at all times.
• Exception Reporting for Loss Prevention – RetailNext can monitor for the tell-tale signs that often indicate theft and report them to store management for closer examination, ultimately enabling the identification and correction of problem behaviors.
• Proactive Data Monitoring – In-store analytics depends on data from thousands of physical input devices such as cameras, shelf pushers, Wi-Fi receivers, and RFID readers across hundreds or thousands of stores, as well as data feeds from a variety of systems in the enterprise. RetailNext will proactively monitor all of these input sources for outages or other faults that can cause loss or data corruption. Immediately identifying such problems helps stores to promptly fix them and thus ensure continued collection of the information necessary to gather critical in-store insights.

"The new revolution in real-time store analytics makes it possible for physical stores to take advantage of the same sort of rich performance data that has benefited online retail for more than a decade," said Arun Nair, co-founder and CTO of RetailNext.  "These new functional enhancements take the category's most popular solution and improve both the quality of insights that managers can gather and the availability of information for management of storefronts."

About RetailNext

RetailNext (formerly BVI Networks) is the leader in real-time in-store measurement, enabling retailers and manufacturers to collect, analyze, and visualize in-store data.  The company uses best-in-class video analytics, on-shelf sensors, data from point-of-sale systems, and other sources, to automatically inform retailers about how shoppers engage in their stores.  The highly scalable RetailNext products easily integrate with promotional calendars, staffing systems, and weather services to analyze how internal and external factors impact customer shopping patterns—providing store operations executives with the ability to identify opportunities for growth, execute changes, and measure success.

Headquartered in San Jose, CA, RetailNext tracks more than 20 million shoppers per month by collecting data from more than 15,000 sensors in retail stores, capturing and analyzing more than one trillion data points per year.  RetailNext is a growing global brand operating in 17 countries.  For more information, see www.bviretailnext.com or call +1-888-609-5877.

SOURCE RetailNext