Space Analytics and Metrics to help you Adjust to a Post-Covid Environment
As businesses re-open and adjust to a new and post-Covid normal, its quickly apparent that relationships with customers, employees, and visitors have changed as well. There are a number of questions to answer - What has changed? How do we keep visitors safe? What do we need to learn? How are they going to behave?
Regardless if you operate in retail or grocery stores, offices or restaurants, museums or libraries, event spaces or trade shows, things have changed in your space and while it was important to understand your space in the past, it’s never been more important.
To help with occupancy control, social distancing, and advanced safety precautions, there are a number of space analytics and metrics you can capture.
Entries - Capture a general idea of when and in what density your visitors are entering your space. While the most common metric to capture, it gives the broadest and most immediate picture as to when people are using your space, and can help you uncover how much your traffic has changed, both in quantity and pattern.
Occupancy - Separate from people coming through your doors, it’s also critical to understand how busy your space truly is. The difference between live entries and exits, or occupancy, can help you adjust your operations to serve your customers, employees, and visitors, as well as help you to better manage safety measures, social distancing, and cleaning. (Learn more about how Scanalytics can help you track occupancy in your space.)
Conversions - For consumer-facing applications, understanding your conversion rates, as well as conversion size, and how they align with your entries and occupancy will give you a great idea about how your customers’ behaviors have changed. While this metric is acquired through a combination of foot traffic technology and your POS, it’s a worthy investment to help you better align your operations with a changing consumer.
Movement - Equally as important but a little more challenging to capture is how visitors are moving throughout your space. Once through your doors, learning about the directionality and paths your visitors take will be immensely helpful in adjusting layouts and other operations to promote social distancing and better serve their needs.
Dwell - While tracking entries and movement throughout a space is powerful, the ability to track how long visitors are staying in spaces can be useful as well. Areas of your space like end-caps, checkout lines, informational kiosks, conference rooms, trade show booths, and more can be moved, redesigned, and re-marketed to make better use of how and when visitors are moving through your space, improving their bottom-line effectiveness.
A greater understanding of your space analytics and traffic is essential in the post-Covid world, but has had and will always have other benefits as well. Adjustments to your staff, ordering, marketing initiatives, and more can be directly correlated to your space, and better aligned to when and how traffic is moving through it.
An analysis of your space and traffic will determine the extent and capabilities of the capture technologies, software, and reporting you’ll need, but is worth the investment to learn the most about your customers, visitors, and employees.