COVID has driven a huge shift in the way people behave and businesses are having to adapt, quickly.
Here are a few fairly alarming statistics:
- 49% of people avoid leaving their homes
- 50% of employees are reluctant to go back to the office
- Three out of four customers fear getting COVID whilst shopping
- 75% of consumers have tried new brands, places to shop, or methods of shopping so far during the pandemic
Now, before heading to work, going to the grocery store, grabbing dinner at a restaurant, or visiting another public space, people think about COVID and venue safety.
And the impact of this can’t be underestimated. Safety, when visiting a public place, has always been a given.
But now it’s at the forefront of people’s minds.
Is it going to be clean? Is it going to be safe?
These concerns pose huge risk for businesses.
The risk to business
If people don’t feel safe, they won’t visit at all. If people do visit, but don’t feel safe, they won’t return.
Loyalty is also in decline as people search for a safer and ultimately more convenient experience.
As a result, safety is quickly becoming a key differentiator in winning business, and the overall customer experience is becoming key in securing it.
So, how do you make people feel safe?
What do businesses need to do to make sure their staff and visitors feel safe enough to return?
Occupancy management and space utilization
If you can capture data to help you monitor occupancy and understand exactly how your space is being used, you can do two things:
- Optimize venue safety, now, and in the future – making sure your staff and visitors feel safe enough to return
- Improve business operations – enabling you to better manage costs and plan for the future
Let me expand.
Through accurately tracking your venue’s occupancy and how people move around, you can ensure that you do not exceed maximum capacity – so that everyone inside can remain socially distant – whilst also improving business operations to match demand.
So, how do I track and monitor occupancy?
You could place a member of staff or two at your entry and exits points manually counting people in and out. But that’s a stupid idea.
Human error is inevitable. Not to mention the fact that if you wanted to try and analyze the data to identify trends, you’d then have to manually enter everything into some kind of spreadsheet. And to keep going… unless you employ 50 additional staff to follow people around, you’ve got no way of understanding how visitors move around your venue.
We had a better idea.
3D sensors and analytics
We specialize in venue analytics, and we’ve built a new integration with 3D sensors, that allows you to automatically and accurately track occupancy.
Here’s how it works.
We connect our cloud-based analytics solution with 3D sensors placed in your venue.
The occupancy data captured by the sensors then feeds directly into our analytics platform, giving you a complete snapshot of venue occupancy, and how people move around.
The data is delivered to you through a number of reports and dashboards within the platform, that can be accessed on any device, any time.
Here’s a summary of what you can report on:
- Real-time and historic occupancy (with up to 98% accuracy)
- Space utilization (with cm accuracy)
And here’s why you’d want to report on it:
- If you can monitor and track occupancy, you can optimize safety, through ensuring overcrowding does not occur in your venue.
- You can also plan better for the future and improve operations through identifying trends and patterns in historic occupancy data. For example, you can alter staffing levels, or stock to match customer demand.
- If you can understand how people move around your venue, you can optimize your space accordingly, whether that’s through expanding your outdoor seating, increasing hand sanitizing stations or maximizing safety signage in more densely populated areas of your venue.
Real-time alerts to prompt action
We then went one step further and built in a number of actionable alerts that fire when certain criteria are met. Because, with the best will in the world, no one is going to sit in front of a dashboard all day.
So, for example, when occupancy begins to get close to capacity, or when a certain area within your area has been used by a set number of people, our solution will let you know, prompting you to take action such as controlling the flow of visitors or cleaning a specific location.
These alerts are delivered in real-time via email or SMS.
Display live occupancy to your visitors
It’s one thing making sure your venue is safe, it’s another thing letting visitors know.
All of the occupancy data with our portal is available to export via API, enabling you to display live occupancy on your website, app, in-venue screens or kiosks.
This gives visitors the data they need to feel safe and make informed decisions. Not only this, but it also helps to reduce influxes in visitors as more people tend to visit when you are a little less busy, minimizing queues and improving the overall experience.
If you’d like more information about our new occupancy management solution, please email sensors@purple.ai.