With the advancement in technology and the urge to satisfy the customers, a new method has been adopted where artificial intelligence bodies forecast the revenue and trends and analyze the buying habits of the consumers through data science. Malls host a tech at their part to help them increase sales and also enhance the overall consumer experience. Long story short, they mine customer behavior to drive sales.
Here’s what India is doing for its malls
In India, prominent malls have revenue-sharing agreements with retailers and shopping centres. They send a daily analysis of real-time sales through a common technological portal. These portals also capture other information on buying patterns and preferences of the consumers to increase the sales and footfall.
The Pacific Mall in New Delhi through algorithms found out that 65% of its customers preferred having vegetarian food at the food court. This made the mall open a Haldiram outlet in their food court which increased the sales by Rs.50 lakhs a month.
Even in the parking lot!
This mall has also installed a technology that tracks the duration of cars parked in the parking lot. The executive director, Abhishek Bansal said that the study showed that a car is parked for an average of three hours of dwell time.
The Orion Mall in Bengaluru found that most of its customers are of the younger generation whose main focus is on purchasing fashionable clothes and electronics leading them to pay attention to those verticals.
Sky is the limit!
The tech firm Pathfinder offers technology services over more than 100 malls and is acting as a medium for them to mine consumer data. It easily tracks sales in real-time and gains insights into retail operations in one instance. Pathfinder is an undisputed leader in smart retailing.
Cameras all around
CCTV cameras are omnipresent. It not only captures pictures but also showcases the heatmap of the people around the mall which helps the owner of the malls to delegate proper manpower and assign facilities. These cameras help in analyzing gender and age brackets of customers and the stores which they are preferring the most.
For example, if the crowd prefers to throng around the sports area then with the help of heatmap technology and tally more stores in that brand can be set up.
It’s just the beginning
The CEO of InOrbit Malls Rajneesh Mahajan who operates several shopping centres in different cities said that agitating consumer data is at a very early stage in India due to the limited and erratic data available from retailers to the mall owners.
It is just the beginning of this exercise, this will evolve gradually and people will get a unified platform to access the data. Unless everyone is on board and works in a similar manner and also the key performance indicators are properly identified it won’t be a success.
