Last week we held our first webcast of the year, “Top 5 Tips on Loss Prevention in Restaurants” kicking off our ’12 webinar series. Mike Davis, Director of Loss Prevention at Rosenfield Restaurants shared his top 5 ways he drives bottom line improvement,  including:

1.  Audit High Risk Transactions.  Certain transactions can be classified as high-risk that include; voided sales, no sale, zero Dollar (or small amount) transactions, and cash refunds.  These transactions should be audited to identify potential fraud and theft.
2.  Good Cash Handling: An effective cash handling should cover; cash counts, single-drawer accountability, cash drops, and cash transactions with customers.  Cash, as a payment type, isn’t going anywhere in the near term.  And with cash comes increase risk that you need to be mindful of.
3.  ID Trends and Chase Your Tail: Compare store performance and employees relatively by looking for deviations from the norm.  Drill in on stores and employees that fall on the outer bounds of expected performance among key metrics.
4.  Protect the Back Door: Manage the back door with the appropriate policies and procedures such as times when the back door should not be opened, when (perhaps always) the backdoor is to be locked, backdoor should never be propped open, etc.
5. Engage Your Managers: Engage with your managers to get them bought-in to the loss prevention program selling them on the benefits to best control their stores. Your managers are accountable for profitability and therefore, reducing shrink. It’s in their best interest to get with the program.

To increase effectiveness of your loss prevention program and ability to drive impact from these Top 5, Mike uses MVaaS (and Envysion specifically).  Mike  shared that he sees managed video as a key strategic tool that enables the program. The integration of the point of sales system and video enables him to successfully employ these top 5 strategies (and many more) in his loss prevention program and the most important part is that Mike is seeing bottom line impact from the program. As he said “Having the video analytics next to POS data tells the entire story of what’s going on.  A picture is worth at thousand words.”

View the recorded webcast here.   

Big thank you to Mike Davis and to those who attended the webinar last week.  More Webinars to come later this year including other industry areas (retail, cinema) and expanded functional areas (marketing, merchandising, Ops) – we look forward to helping you deliver bottom line impact . 

Some more exciting news for MVaaS and specifically Envysion.  A couple weeks back Envysion announced that it was named to Red Herring’s Global 100.   You may recall that back in the summer of 2011 Envysion received the North America Red Herring 100 award and this award was a next step and included leading companies from North America, Europe and Asia.  

The Red Herring’s Global 100 list is a great distinction and in particular Envysion is excited to join companies such as Google, Skype, Salesforce.com, YouTube, and eBay that have recieved the award.   We are fired up to be named and want to extend big thank you’s to the Envysion team who deliver for our customers and have developed our innovative solution. 

Specifically for readers of this blog we should all be excited about the validation and recognition this brings to MVaaS.  I hope you all share in our excitement, we look forward to significant bottom line impact for our customers in 2012!  

Many of our users are district or regional managers. By definition of their job description, they are on the road a lot. In order to make our service useful to these users, we needed consider a mobile design that empowers them to get the most benefit of our service on a mobile device without any of the frill.

Designing for mobile is fun. It forces you to remove anything extraneous and hyper-focus on the core functionality required to do what a user needs to do on a mobile device. Thinking of our mobile application, customers have expressed the desire to simply view live video, search and view recorded video, and load recorded video from an alert notification. Pretty simple.

So, when you see our mobile application, my hope is that you appreciate the elegance in the clean, simple design.

Stay tuned…

Last weekend I went out to dinner at a local chain of restaurants. Mid-order the waitress abruptly turned around and walked away. A few bewildering minutes later she returned to apologize and candidly explained that the chef demands that when food is ready someone instantly takes it to the customer. Our waitress informed me that rather than face being berated by the chef, the staff has become like Pavlov’s dog, compulsively responding to the chef’s bell. While good in theory – no one wants their meal to sit under a warmer – in practice, this results in rude wait staff and an off-putting customer experience.

I can’t imagine the restaurant chain’s owner knows of the informal policy for waitresses to drop everything they are doing to pick up their orders. The chef must act differently when the owner is present. However, this is exactly the kind of insight the owner needs to improve his business.  How many customers return after experiencing this? The food was delicious, but I will certainly think twice before going again. Of course, I couldn’t help but think that video would give the restaurant owner the true picture of what goes on in his restaurant when he’s not present. The ability to perform undetected, virtual audits would quickly unveil how waitresses spontaneously abandon tables mid-conversation.  Once the issue is detected, the root cause would not be hard to detect, and the restaurant owner could address the issue with the chef.

Learn more about how MVaaS delivers valuable insights for restaurants.

You break expectations by changing what someone’s already used to. You change expectations by giving them something new. Understanding the difference is key to product design.

-Jason Fried

As a product manager, this quote really resonated with me. It got me thinking though; this philosophy does not apply to product design alone, but could be applied more broadly to say, retailers. Think about it: experiences and expectations are arguably equally pertinent to retailers.

What this really comes down to is innovation. Since “innovation” is an overused and diluted buzzword, I am going to say, “inventive.” Plus, there is a slight distinction – innovation deals with improving upon the known (not that this is bad thing) whereas being inventive carries the connotation of creating something new.

In turn, what this comes down to is differentiation. Another buzzword so let’s instead say, “being different.” Being different is risky, scary (just ask the nerd in high school); it requires you to be daring and, dare I say, sometimes controversial. This means not being all things to all people but rather being exactly what you need to be for your customers… so much so that you help give them identity.

So how does a retailer become inventive?

Well, that comes from within. You need creative people. But you also need to encourage their creativity; provide a safe environment where ideas can be shared and vetted. One of the natural hesitations I think you see in organizations is a difficulty – or lack of willingness – to bear the cost of being creative and trying new things.

There is no doubt an expense in time and money to try new things. It is possible to mitigate some of the risk of being inventive. It requires experimentation. You could probably go so far as to say you can’t have invention without experimentation.

Experimentation requires a hypothesis (an idea) to test and the ability to make observations from which to form further hypotheses and draw conclusions. Here’s where the MVaaS spin on things comes into play for the retailer.

The retailer has a crazy new idea to test. A test location or two is picked and the experiment is set-up. Video is used to make observations, to study customer behavior. The retailer uses an MVaaS system to collaborate across a team and share findings. Then, when the time is right, the retailer is able to make data-based, objective decisions, and release the “next big thing” out into the world on a large scale with confidence.

Explore and embrace what it is that makes you different and don’t be afraid to build on that. Being inventive takes guts… but the payoff can be well worth the risk.

According to Adweek, here are the most frequently stolen item during the holidays:

10. Nikes

9. Channel No. 5

8. Let’s Rock Elmo

7. Polo Ralph Lauren

6. Axe

5. Gillete Mach 4

4. iPhone 4

3. Electric Tools

2. Jameson

1. Filet Migon

The most surprising thing about this list in my opinion? Not that fine meat is the #1 stolen item. That cash doesn’t make the list at all. With retailers staffing up with temporary holiday employees, the risk of internal fraud and theft skyrockets. Perhaps the reason cash doesn’t make the list is because it’s difficult and time consuming to detect and prove this type of internal theft from employees who know how to disguise their theft as valid transactions. Well, difficult and time consuming for everyone except Envysion’s customers, who use our video-driven business intelligence ^TM   to quickly and easily identify costly internal theft.

See how our MVaaS solutions can help stop internal theft in your organization.

Calling all MVaaS, VSaaS and hosted video providers, customers and end users, channel and solution partners – Save the date.

3^rd Annual MVaaS Summit – Unleash Video
October 7-9, 2012
Boulder, CO

This year the summit will focus on how we all can unleash the power of video based business intelligence in the market, the channel, and across all potential customer segments.  Managed and hosted models open up new video capabilities and never before thought of use cases.  Video is no longer constrained to a limited value proposition with just a few users, we now have an opportunity to unleash video and deliver a tool to customers that improves decision making and drives profit improvement.  The unfiltered visibility video provides gives an understanding of what actually is happening at the site level – solving the age old challenge of ensuring proper execution and giving an understand of the real life story behind the numbers.  Please join us and help accelerate and shape this transformation!

I’ll have more info about registration in the next few weeks. In the meantime, we are accepting speaker proposals for engaging presentations, use cases, breakout sessions or panels. Please send your ideas over and lets talk.  We do also have a few limited sponsorship opportunities available. If you’re interested in sponsoring, send an email to Hayley.

Looking forward to seeing you this fall.

LP Innovations has a good post on implementing an effective mystery shopper program in order to have a good sense of how your stores operate when you are not present. To summarize, be objective and discrete in what you have your mystery shopper look for, focus your effort locations that are below average on your top KPIs, and keep track of progress of stores over time to gauge if changes dictated by discoveries made from mystery shoppers are being effectively implemented.

Mystery shopping is an interesting application for Managed Video. A Virtual Mystery Shopper (as I would venture to call it) has some intriguing advantages:

• A virtual mystery shopper “visiting” more locations sitting from their desk is more efficient
• A virtual mystery shopper can archive video evidence of what employees do well and not so well
• Archived video can be shared in order to help managers train their employees by example

Of course, what you lose is the actual personal interaction which no doubt has its own advantages.

A comprehensive mystery shopper program would arguably use both methodologies – one complementing the other. Perform preliminary and on-going routine mystery shopper audits virtually, edifying the program with in-person mystery shopper visits to problematic locations. Both the virtual and in-person mystery shoppers should be focused on the same objectives for a store. They should collaborate and share findings, compare notes, and video clips (in the case of the virtual mystery shopper). Working together, virtual and in-person mystery shoppers can maximize the impact of a mystery shopping program.

Virtual mystery shopping is another way that Managed Video is changing how video technology can be used by enterprises to gain insights so that they can in turn make meaningful decisions of how to evolve in order to run a more efficient, a more effective, a more profitable business.

There is a revolution happening in the video surveillance industry, and it’s not about fancier cameras. It’s about the next frontier of business intelligence. Video is the most powerful and direct source of business intelligence data, and it can be used not only for loss prevention, but also for insight into marketing, operations, human resources, and many other departments. With online video surveillance software, leaders across the organization can gain unfiltered visibility into daily, store-level events, allowing them to instantly make strategic, profit-driving decisions.

Loss prevention specialists have a unique opportunity at this moment of transformation to become profit creation champions within their organizations and be recognized as leaders. For example, one champion received the company’s President’s Award (out of over 7,000 employees) specifically for her work deploying online video surveillance services and driving profitability improvements across the organization. Another was one of only 5 people out of over 25,000 to receive the company’s highest possible individual annual performance review score for his work deploying and managing online video, driving meaningful profits to the bottom line.

Making this transformation requires a paradigm shift in the way people think about video surveillance, from the traditional loss prevention orientation to realizing that visual data is actually a powerful business intelligence tool that can impact behavior across the entire organization. This shift in thinking is reflected in a transition from calculating the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a video system to considering the Return on Investment (ROI) that the system can actually generate. Rather than a cost that the organization must bear, video should be a tool that the organization uses to increase revenues and profitability.

Learn more about how to drive profits through using online video as a business intelligence tool.

Integrated Solutions for Retailers recently covered the topic of self-checkout. Although 65% of consumers consider self-checkout an important aspect in enhancing their shopping experience, the editor  points out that many retailers are re-evaluating or changing course on their investment in self-checkout technology. A few pages later, another author argues for self-checkout, citing reduced payroll costs as the main benefit. As a consumer, I personally love the convenience of self-checkout, and I can see some other major benefits of the technology for retailers:

Loss Prevention – A major source of loss for retailers is internal theft from employees. Self-checkout machines will not steal from you. Although retailers will still need to watch for external customer theft, the overall risk of internal theft is lower with self-checkout and can be easily identified with video integrated exception reports.

Sales – As we’ve seen with Amazon, technology has the ability to take consumer data and recommend highly relevant products. Self-checkout could offer the same relevant product cross sell/upsell opportunities in the store. Imagine if the self-checkout machine could prompt consumers with questions like “Did you know we have a matching necklace for the earrings you purchased? Would you like to add the necklace to your cart?” Combine this with frequent customer card data and the self-checkout could remind consumers of frequently purchased items that are missing from the transaction – “It’s been two weeks since you last bought milk. Would you like to add milk to your cart?” If the customer answers yes, the price of the added item would be automatically added to the receipt and a sales associate would bring the customer the item. Add video to the self-checkout area, and the retailer gains valuable primary research data into what questions result in higher sales.