Challenge
A national retailer wanted to understand how customers engage with its current services and to use these insights to find ways to:
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Cut customer wait times.
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Increase sales revenue.
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Set achievable KPIs.
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Collaborate better across locations.
Operating across the U.S., the retailer realized it was losing potential revenue due to customer wait times at its sites. It recognized the value of being able to track and measure how long customers were spending on their property before leaving.
To address this challenge, the retailer sought innovative solutions that could use existing technologies without requiring more investment. A previous in-house pilot that predated the availability of newer, more capable AI- and IoT-based technologies had generated awareness of the need but not the actionable data to deliver this value.
Solution
Why Optra? Lexmark’s Optra IoT was the ideal solution. It integrated the retailer’s existing on-site camera infrastructure with Lexmark’s IoT and AI offerings. By removing the need for large capital investment, this was a fast, effective, and cost-optimized solution. The setup was easy, with an Optra Edge hardware device added to the current video feed to capture existing live camera streams.
AI applications then extracted and collated relevant data on wait times and time spent on the property. This data was transmitted in real time as user-friendly metrics to where it could be actioned by staff on site and to corporate HQ for central analysis. Lexmark’s vision-based AI solution improved the accuracy and integrity of the data captured, training the AI model to distinguish between distinct parts of the retail experience and customer journey.
Result
The results quickly quantified the retail journey, providing detailed analytics into how long customers were spending on site and how long they were waiting. This data was applied in various ways to improve the offering and drive revenue.
Establishing a meet-and-greet policy ensured that every waiting customer was personally spoken to by a staff member within a set timeframe, creating a richer customer engagement experience. This delivered immediate revenue benefits, with follow-up data showing that customers tended to stay in line longer and make a purchase if they interacted with an associate. Lexmark’s IoT solution helped generate additional annual revenue of $50+ million. Staff could now act on live data to engage customers and reduce wait times.