Tag: influencer

In a world beset by health and safety concerns, video surveillance has gained new value. For example, automated check-ins can reduce interpersonal contact—and provide a friendly reminder to mask up.

But video is still a challenge to manage. To learn how retailers can simplify matters, technology power couple Sarah-Jayne and Dean Gratton spoke with experts from Digital Barriers, a leader in AI-powered and IoT-connected safety and security systems. Here’s what they discovered about intelligent cameras and video-as-a-service.

(To listen to the full interview, check out our podcast Retail Tech Chat Episode 6.)

Video Over Cellular Networks

Dean Gratton: So, Graham, you’re new to the team.

Graham Herries: I’m Graham Herries. I’m SVP Engineering for Digital Barriers.

Sarah-Jayne Gratton: Zak, great to have you here. Tell us, what does Digital Barriers do, and what’s your role there?

Zak Doffman: I’m one of the founders of the business and the chief executive. Digital Barriers specializes in edge intelligent video solutions. And what that means is that we specialize in getting video back from wherever it’s captured to wherever it’s needed in absolutely real time, over primarily wireless networks. We do lots of analysis on the edge as well, so the video that we return is the video that’s actually required.

We started our life in the military and intelligence space, and then about two years ago we pivoted the business, so that we could take the same technologies into the broader commercial and critical infrastructure worlds.

Dean: What was your experience like when you first started with the military compared to today where you’ve got 5G technology?

Zak: It’s a great question. The core technology that we use to do very low bandwidth, zero latency video streaming is proprietary, and it was invented 15, 20 years ago. It’s kind of long in the tooth, as they say. It was able to stream live video over 2G, so way before any of the broadband wireless networks that we see today.

Every time there’s a new wireless technology, it becomes more broadband, and the desire for live video just becomes greater. Each time there has been a change in network protocols, we’ve seen a huge surge in our growth, and I think we’ll see the same thing with 5G.

What we’ve got is a technology that is very happy on 5G but then will move down to LTE, to 4G, or to 3G as required, so that the quality of service that a customer actually gets in the real world is always good.

Dean: That really does echo, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I did have a question maybe a few weeks ago where someone said, “Well, I’ve got a fixed infrastructure which is wired. It’s working. Shall I upgrade it to a 5G service?” I just wondered, “Why would you do that?” Because if it’s working, why change it?

Zak: Again, you’ve hit on another problem as well which is, we’re in a hybrid world of fixed and mobile connections, wireless connections, and what customers want is, they don’t really care whether a connection is coming over wireless or fixed. They just want it to work and they want it to be the same.

What we’re seeing, and what we have is the ability to run the same kind of analytics regardless of the bearer. So, if I’m a customer and I’ve got 10,000 video streams, two-thirds of them might be fixed and a third on wireless. But I want the same dashboard, I want the same analytics. I want to be able to manage all those video streams in the same way.

The fact that it’s a different technology streaming video from a vehicle or a body-worn camera than from a CCTV point in an open public space is irrelevant to the customer; they don’t care, they just want it to work.

Video Privacy and Security

Sarah-Jayne: How do you secure the privacy and security of the videos that are transmitted over public airways, for example?

Zak: We do this in two ways. The first thing is, when people talk about secure transmission of video, often what they mean is they’ve just put a VPN around it. In essence, they’ve built a secure tunnel, and they’ve piped the video through that.

The problem with that is it adds quite a significant overhead to the amount of data that you’re pushing. It could be a 20, 25% overhead. So if you were constrained for bandwidth before, you simply make the problem worse.

What we do is control the streaming technology, the codec. We’re able to build encryption into that codec. There’s a 1 or 2% overhead only, in terms of making sure that it’s encrypted.

The second thing is we’re end-to-end, so we’re encrypted at both sides. Although we’ll decrypt and decode when the video lands in its secure location, we can ensure that that video isn’t compromised. We can wipe endpoints. We can watermark video. We can do everything to ensure that that video is exactly what’s captured, and we can tell you when it was captured.

Edge AI

Sarah-Jayne: Yeah. So, guys, tell me, what is edge AI and why does it matter?

Zak: Our USP is the combination of the ability to get live video back where it’s needed, when it’s needed, but also to analyze what’s taking place at the edge. One way to reduce the amount of video that you’re streaming, and to ensure that the stuff that lands back on somebody’s screen is important, is to ensure that you’re analyzing it.

What edge AI means simply is that you’re running AI-based analytics on the edge, as opposed to trying to pipe all of that video back to the cloud and run all of your analytics in the cloud, which traditionally is how these things have worked.

What we’re seeing at the moment is almost like two camps. We’re seeing increasing amounts of AI capabilities within silicon AI devices. They’re, in essence, pre-programmed to conduct certain levels of analysis. Or we’re seeing these huge cloud players that are able to run all kinds of different business and security analytics but on huge volumes of cloud, video data. But that means that you’ve pretty much got a fixed cable from the camera back to the cloud, and you’re piping everything back.

What we do is what we call hybrid analytics. We’re able to mix and match what we do at the edge and what we do at the center, and that means, for example, if you’ve got a more capable edge process, you can do more at the edge, and if you haven’t, then you push more data back to the cloud. You make it very efficient for a customer.

What’s also important is that we can use the cloud to provide, as needed, backup, if you like, to what’s taking place at the edge. Great way to think about this is that what we try to do at the edge is kind of narrow down the bit of the haystack where the needle may be, but what we do in the cloud is find the needle.

We do that by, in essence, sending certain events back to the cloud where we think there may be something that fits whatever’s being looked for, and then we run much more efficient and effective and powerful analytics in the cloud, where we have unlimited processing, to determine if that’s a false alert or that’s a real detection. And all that happens sub-second.

By the time the customer gets an alert, we’ve done all that. They don’t know that that’s what’s taken place, but that makes our analytics much more accurate.

Dean: So what does AI actually mean? Is it about the predictive analytics? Is it about the data munching?

Graham: Yeah. As you highlighted, deep learning neural networks are a subset of the kind of broad term AI. We’ve been investing in deep neural networks, DNNs, for quite a few years now. Luckily, I’ve got a very specialist team who’ve been doing this for 15, 20 years, having got multiple people with PhDs in video analytics.

One of the things we’re seeing increasingly is, due to the advancements in chipsets and frameworks and libraries, is the ability to do DNNs at the edge a lot more cost-effectively.

Post-Pandemic Surveillance Needs

Sarah-Jayne: How do you think retail and hospitality applications for video surveillance have changed in the wake of the pandemic?

Zak: It’s a great question. I think things were changing anyway. There’s a lot of talk about the virtualization of video storage and using the cloud as a back-end, rather than have complex, on-premises solutions. I think everyone was heading in that direction.

Even before the pandemic, you were starting to see much lighter-weight, cost-effective, easier-to-deploy video-surveillance-as-a-service applications hitting the hospitality and the retail sectors. Now, the pandemic’s completely changed the relationship between those sectors and their customers, and the responsibilities that they have.

There are all kinds of rules and regulations in different countries around the world about how many people can enter a particular location and do they have to be wearing face coverings, and do they have to be a certain distance apart. There’s lots of premises that are still closed or have different opening hours, and that leads to a different level of security requirement.

What we pride ourselves on is that we have a platform which enables us to build new capabilities quickly. A great example of that is what we’re doing at the moment, where addressing customer needs around the latest, I guess, impact to those sectors is mask detection and people counting.

If you’re running a store or a hospitality facility and there’s only a certain number of people allowed in at a time and you need to make sure that those people know they’re supposed to be wearing face coverings, that’s quite an onus to put on your staff, to have to confront people every day of the week.

What we’re able to do is use technology. We can let people know if their location is full. If they’re not wearing a mask or a face covering, that they should put one on. Not confrontational, it’s an advisory notice. In that way we’re able to take some of the sting and the confrontation out of it and make life easier for the people running those sectors.

As we move into the next year, I think we’re starting to see certain trends again that technology will reflect. We’re looking at things like contact-free identity assurance. I think we’re already seeing some of the technologies, and this is back to the facial recognition point, where we’re all used to going to E-passport gates and using our faces instead of handing over a piece of paper to a border officer and then we can go through one of those kiosks.

Facial Recognition Regulations

Dean: Zak, how do you overcome those public concerns with facial recognition?

Zak: It’s difficult because there’s a vacuum, a kind of a regulatory vacuum in most countries at the moment, and where we are seeing regulation, it might be seeing an overstep of that. But if you look here, say in the U.K. and in the U.S., traditionally there hasn’t been any rules or regulations, any limitations, and what that’s allowed is the industry and its customers, in essence, to overstep because there’s no guidance.

I think what we need is regulation. We need to say, look, there are some absolutely clear use cases for things like facial recognition in a security environment. But if you try to use the technology to identify shoplifters or to stop somebody who’s kicked out of a bar from getting back in, you’ve got no public consensus. Most people think that’s an overstep.

So, I think it falls to the regulators, the government, the lawmakers, to actually set some limits and say, “Look, we start with the obvious stuff, where the use cases are clearly not contentious, and then we have to decide where the line is, what we’re prepared to do.”

Dean: How accurate is facial recognition? For example, when I go out and about in public, I tend to wear a hat, and I’ve got this fuzzy face. How accurate is the technology today to overcome those subtleties?

Zak: The normal rule of thumb with face rec is, the best technologies would recognize somebody if somebody who that person knows would recognize them. If one of your friends passed you on the street, and they were a bit disguised, you’d probably recognize them. If they were too disguised, you wouldn’t. And the technologies are broadly the same. But clearly there’s no limitation. It can recognize more than just people you know. It can recognize an unlimited set of subjects.

Facial recognition is all about maths and data quality. Those are the two things to keep in mind: the quality of the images or the video against which you’re comparing people, and then the quality of the video that you’re capturing at the scene, which is based on lighting and environmentals and the positioning of the camera.

If that’s all very good, you have a very good chance of your 99.99% recognition. The more you compromise that, if you have poor captured imagery, so you might have a surveillance photograph that’s very poor, or if you’re operating in a shadowy environment, in bad weather, in bad light, then you make it harder. So that’s the first consideration.

The second is about maths. If I put tens of thousands of people on a watch list and put a camera in a very busy place, and tens of thousands of people walk past, every person is being compared to tens of thousands of people. You’re into the hundreds of billions of calculations. So, even a 0.001% error rate, that’s a lot of people who are actually going to be misidentified.

You factor that in to how you do it, and because we specialize in operating in a difficult environment, we’ve got all kinds of tools and tricks to make it much more accurate than competing technology. We’ll help our customers understand whether there are constraints in the quality of imagery or the quality of the environment to factor into it, and we’ll help segment watch lists so that they can help it be as accurate as possible.

It’s all about outcomes. Where we’ve worked with law enforcement agencies, they’re hugely positive about the impact that the technology’s had to help them pick very bad guys off the street. Our technology has tended only to be used for the really bad guys, serious criminals, dangerous individuals, terrorists, threats to national security.

Video Surveillance as a Service

Sarah-Jayne: Digital Barriers, you offer video surveillance as a service. Can you tell us a bit more about what that means?

Zak: VSaaS is the biggest shakeup to the video surveillance and security industry probably ever, realistically, certainly since IP video became mainstream. What it is, it’s taking all of the complexity, all of that hardware, all of that cabling out of the equation, and it’s putting everything into a virtual cloud environment. It’s giving you complete flexibility of your endpoint.

You could take a camera, in essence, configure it through the cloud, that’s then set up on your cloud back-end, but, in essence, you’re renting it as your service. It means that you can push analytics out to those edge endpoints, whether they’re CCTV cameras or body-worn cameras or vehicles, and manage the whole thing virtually as a service, cost-effectively. Because the real impediment to these huge, large video schemes in the past has been the service, the cabling, the redundancy and the power management. All of that is taken out of the equation.

Right now, VSaaS is still tiny compared to the whole market. We’ve seen in the home market, with the likes of Amazon and Google and others getting into the game in terms of providing the cameras that many of us have at home now, which are clearly linked to a cloud back-end, and we’re starting to see that make it into the commercial environment, and that’s what we’re providing.

We work with partners like Vodafone to provide a kind of a hosted video surveillance solution, video security solution, and we think that that is the future of the industry. If you look at the analysis, the VSaaS market is going to completely disrupt the video surveillance and security market over the next 10 years, and it will have the same impact that IP had on analog video 10, 15 years ago.

Sarah-Jayne: Everything’s heading toward cloud, isn’t it? Everything’s moving to the cloud.

Zak: I think for this, video’s hard to manage. Video’s a really badly behaved data type. It’s hard to move around. It’s hard to store. It’s hard to search. It’s hard to retrieve. So if you can use common tools and techniques and somebody else’s scalable back-end to manage it, and then if you can run really sophisticated analytics to limit what you stream, what you store, because what you don’t want is petabytes of unneeded video that you’re never going to watch, that just clog up somebody else’s cloud service and cost you a lot of money.

The whole thing is not just about taking a server and putting it in the cloud, it’s a re-architecture. It’s around what do people want.

What’s really interesting here is, and this has been driven by the California tech giants, traditionally, in video security, you captured everything, you stored everything that happened for weeks or months, or even years, and it was there just in case you needed it.

What we’re seeing now is that requirement to get video to where it’s needed, when it’s needed, and then you store the important stuff. We can obviously do either, but actually that second shift really lends itself to a kind of a cloud VSaaS model.

Dean: You talked about video grade, because it is quite large and now it’s 4K and 8K. It’s going to be huge. Are there techniques to compress that video content down to manageable sizes across the cloud?

Graham: Actually, I would say largely, for the surveillance video market, the thought of streaming 4K video to the cloud, or for processing and analysis, is just an almost unimaginable feat. It’s one of the reasons why our technology to deploy our analytics and encoder capability at the edge to just trigger on events, is one of the powerful features for dealing with certainly high-resolution video.

The more resolution you have, the more ability to actually discern objects and understand the features, using the DNNs: Is this a person, and is this person wearing a red jumper or a green jumper? Is this a car? A blue car or a green car? What’s this number plate? Is it easily discernible? All these things preferably you want to do at the edge because otherwise your CPU cost and data charges, especially at 4K resolution, are going to be enormous.

Cutting-Edge Technology

Sarah-Jayne: I understand that Intel actually came to you guys.

Zak: We’ve always used Intel and technology through the life of DB, but two or three years ago Intel knocked on the door and said they’re running analysis; they’re looking for innovative AI startups or growing businesses in the U.K. We were one of the top five they’d found, and they were really interested in working out if there was a partnership opportunity, an opportunity to work together, which was great to hear, and clearly we told our board that at the earliest opportunity because it sounded cool.

But actually, more importantly, Intel have followed up and have been true to their word. They really do, time and attention, and it’s been amazingly helpful to us in terms of that relationship. I think Graham can talk about some of what’s actually taken place on the ground, but it has been great.

Sarah-Jayne: Graham, can you give us some examples of how Intel have helped you deliver your capabilities?

Graham: It’s been really exciting actually because the technology that Intel have been delivering, especially around the kind of AI and their OpenVINO framework, has gone through almost exponential increase in capability and performance over the last couple of years, so much so that if I look back to where we were two or three years ago, everything was very custom, very bespoke, and less. We had to knife and fork a solution onto a hardware platform, be it Intel or be it the competition.

But the power of the tools now, it’s very much switched to, “Okay, let’s look at OpenVINO first approach,” because their hardware acceleration, as well as the flexibility of their library, is just worlds away from where it was, and in some respects we can’t thank them enough for doing that because, as Zak says, it’s enabled us to have frameworks in place so that we can retrain for new situational video analytics, methods, really quickly, and start to analyze them.

One of our key areas of know-how has been around training and data because data, and data quality in particular, is really fundamental to AI. Without good data quality, then your result in a DNN solution will be quite poor. We’ve invested a lot in that, and now being able to just leverage that with a really powerful framework has been great.

We’re really excited to see the new hardware coming out of Intel as well because as we’ve talked about AI at the edge and hybrid analytics, and we see such a great opportunity for even greater neural processing using the kind of neural computation approach that Intel have got at the edge, it could be an enormous game changer.

Realizing the Benefits of Advanced Technology

Sarah-Jayne: Is there anything you’d like to talk about that we haven’t covered?

Zak: I think what’s interesting now is that the imperatives we were seeing around the shift to better edge technology, VSaaS we’ve talked about, I think all of that is being accelerated. I think we’ve already seen levels of disruption over the last few months as technology has started to find its way into the frontline. I think we’ll see more.

We haven’t talked about the use of our mobile technology in triage. Frontline medical workers can send video back to more senior doctors elsewhere over a secure network. We haven’t talked about body-worn cameras as we see workers in potentially hostile environments, as we different requirements placed on the police, as we see the implications on retail, where retail staff are being thrust into the frontline.

I think wherever we look right now in the security world, we’re seeing disruption, and obviously that lends itself to businesses that can move quickly and be flexible.

Graham: We’ve taken an approach of remotely holding our customers’ hands. It’s just not enough anymore just to have good tech. It’s great to have phenomenal USPs, but you’ve got to really have customer empathy, and it’s really important to how we deliver everything tech at the moment.

Dean: I think that you touched upon that, Graham, I think that’s right. I also get frustrated with the people who over-inflate technology’s capabilities. How do you control that?

Graham: That’s a really good question. Can you control it? I’m not convinced you can because, as you say, everybody wants to be an early adopter. I think what you have to do is ensure you can actually deploy something.

So, again, I kind of come back to that spiel I just talked about, and it’s about how can a customer deploy a solution to actually add value to their business?

This is not about how we apply tech just for the sake of applying tech. This is about customer use cases and operational use cases, and we really need to understand what’s required and then deliver a solution and deliver the tech to support that, rather than deliver the tech for the sake of the tech.

Digital displays are showing up everywhere inside—and outside—retail establishments. From massive LED arrays that cover an entire building facade to shelf-edge displays, signage is giving merchants countless ways to communicate with consumers.

To learn how signage can create amazing brand experiences and generate additional revenue for retailers, technology power couple Sarah-Jayne and Dean Gratton interviewed experts from ONELAN, a leader in digital visual communications that serves customers including Virgin, Tesco, and L’Oreal.

(To listen to the full interview, check out our podcast Retail Tech Chat Episode 5. For more on this topic, read the article The Many Faces of Digital Signage.)

The Many Faces of Digital Signage

Dean Gratton: What does ONELAN do, and what do you do?

Simon Carp: ONELAN is a company that specializes in digital communications technologies, primarily in digital signage. ONELAN is part of the Uniguest group.

ONELAN’s digital signage technologies are most commonly found across retail, also in higher education, corporate offices, public venues. And across the wider Uniguest group, you’ll find our technologies deployed consistently for guest engagement applications, but more broadly across hospitality, sports stadiums, along with the other verticals that I mentioned.

As for my role, I head up our product management function. As part of that, I have a small team that is responsible for making sure that we are really in touch with what our customers are trying to accomplish, what are they finding challenging in achieving their objectives and strategy and trying to develop solutions that are really going to effectively make their life easier.

That means we have very regular contact liaising with both customers and our sales team, who are spread worldwide, and translating that into definitions of new products and new services that we can build within our development team and then take to market.

Dean: Knowing that the kids and the university students have gone back, how that’s working in the education system?

Simon: Yeah, absolutely. Across all settings, we’ve never had a greater need to communicate really clearly with our audience. So although we are living in challenging times, some of the benefits of digital signage are really coming to the fore. We are able to get messages out there to the masses. We can keep it up to date because we all know how frequently either government or local business or institution policies can change.

We can get the content out there, and we can get those messages out there far more effectively than some of the other traditional mediums that you might be reliant upon, like email and intranet sites. It’s got an awful lot to add to those types of institutions to make sure that they’re successfully getting the message across with regard to COVID-19 and social distancing and those types of policies.

At the moment we’re running a campaign, which is STAYSAFE, which is really highlighting some of the key features within our product set that we feel are relevant now more than ever.

Sarah-Jayne Gratton: Stephanie, tell us a bit about what you do.

Stephanie Scott: I work with Simon very closely in the product management team, and I’m Head of Pro AV Marketing. We’re responsible for launching campaigns across the globe. These are a combination of tactical campaigns, anything that may help our end customers, as well as more strategic-level campaigns, such as the ones Simon just mentioned, which is our recently launched STAYSAFE campaign.

To add to what he just said about education, we’ve just found out actually one of our customers has deployed digital signs within halls of residence to communicate with students.

I’ve visited some universities recently and I can see the posters stuck on the doors, whereas digital signage within those halls can allow that message to be communicated really quickly, can help those students understand that they are being kept safe, and the latest protocols that are available. So it’s a win-win.

Signage in the Age of COVID

Sarah-Jayne: How do you think the pandemic has changed digital signage?

Stephanie: We’ve seen it used in different ways. Corporates are using it now to communicate the key messages of safety: wear a mask, wash your hands, social distancing. They’re using it to communicate with their employees in a way that previously they wouldn’t have done.

They can also use it to communicate whether an area is full, with our occupancy management solutions: if it’s possible to go into a canteen, if they should or shouldn’t. Also, in retail: Is the store full? Is the store empty? Is it safe for people to go in?

So the applications and the messaging are becoming a lot tighter, and we’re helping our customers not just by installing the signage but also giving them custom template layouts that they can immediately deploy. Just trying to make their lives as easy as possible, as quickly as possible. As Simon alluded to, things are changing very quickly. We never know from one day to the next what the latest protocol might be, and that’s no one’s fault, that’s just the guidelines are continually evolving.

Trying to help our customers keep pace with those changes, and ultimately keep people safe, is one of the priorities and that’s part of the premise behind the STAYSAFE campaign, all the tools that we have available to help deliver safety messages for staff, employees, visitors.

Digital Signage in All Shapes and Sizes

Sarah-Jayne: What about concerts and events—are those the kinds of things that you would address?

Simon: Yeah, definitely. It’s definitely part of our overall solution and that very large end of signage, and we’ve got examples across the Nordics, in Russia, in Taiwan. In India, you’ll find various roadside billboards being used by the government to communicate what’s going on in the local area and the government policies.

We’re driving a large range of LEDs. So rather than LCD TV panels, it tends to be a very large array of LEDs, which allows you to create something that’s a little bit non-standard, in terms of a display.

Sarah-Jayne: Signage comes in all shapes and sizes. Which end of the market do you address?

Simon: We really address both ends. It comes to quite extremes. In terms of size, we would use our technology to deliver content to a display that’s perhaps only 10 inches in size. That could be a small display in a corporate office by a meeting room. It could equally be a small display within a retail setting, directly next to the product that it’s promoting.

At the opposite end of the scale, very large displays. We’re delivering content to large video walls where you perhaps have multiple LCD screens tiled together to create a much larger display. At the very largest end of the scale, generally outdoor displays will be the larger that you will find. In those scenarios, using LED-based technologies, we’re delivering content to a display that might be meters, tens of meters, corner to corner, across the exterior of a building, advertising content to the local community.

Shape is another interesting one and gives another interesting dimension. There’s a lot of technologies developing and becoming more accessible, cost-wise, with new LED technologies. That allows you to really create a display that is any shape you like. It’s almost limitless in that sense.

It can be 3-dimensional, it can be curved. There’s an awful lot you can do with it. We’ve got some great examples where some of our customers have taken ONELAN’s technology and those new display technologies.

There’s one really nice instance where there’s a retail concession where they’ve wrapped the façade of the shop with LED and that allows them to use the whole space, all the way round from the floor to the ceiling. It has a cutout for the window so you can still see in and out of the store. And there’s a cutout for the door so can get in and out.

But they can use that entire architectural surface to present content and reinforce a brand and promotions for what’s going on in that particular store, and it’s really effective.

It’s the kind of thing you can’t not see. You might not be interested, but you’re going to see it whether you like to or not.

Interactive Signage

Dean: What about interaction? From a customer experience point of view, to actually interact. Are we there with virtual reality or augmented reality? Can you interact with these devices or these displays?

Simon: Yeah. We’ve seen touch interaction become far more prevalent, using the signage to be passive, and play out video content to an audience. But you’ll find increasingly in retail, shopping malls, and universities, in businesses, those types of displays are also interactive. You can use them to navigate a building, to get access to more detailed information about local events, what’s going on in the area, product catalogs, for example, promotions.

I would say there’s probably a degree of hesitance at the moment with touchscreen interfaces. I think that’s inevitable given the COVID-19 crisis that’s going on at the moment. But it will be interesting to see how that particular challenge evolves over the course of time.

Dean: What about augmented reality? You talked about that shop experience where there are enormous displays.

Simon: AR perhaps lends itself more to mobile devices because it allows you to use the camera to almost investigate an area and have content augmented on your display. There are, I guess, similar examples in digital signage.

We’ve got a really nice project with a hotel with the Cartoon Network brand. In their restaurant, they have displays that are installed to almost appear as windows, and behind those windows is the kitchen. Rather than seeing that, you actually see Cartoon Network characters creating dishes, washing the plates.

Creating a New Experience

Sarah-Jayne: How do you think signage is evolving from just an advertising channel into an integral part of the consumer experience?

Simon: I think attitudes and technologies are maturing continually. Certainly, the growth of e-commerce has forced retailers to reevaluate what they’re offering to the consumer in the physical space. I think it’s now definitely going beyond purely functional displays to show information.

There’s still a space, and it’s still relevant to show promotions and promote marketing campaigns on digital signage, but there’s definitely an increase in interest in how we can take this technology to build and contribute to the overall experience a consumer has within the store.

It definitely can help build the ambience within a retail setting. It can sometimes seem frivolous, but there’s so many things you can do creatively with digital signage, in terms of what content can you show that’s really going to resonate with your target market.

It could be just a streamed video of what’s going on at a beautiful beach in California, but it sets that ambience for the retailer. It takes somebody to a different place where their mood is perhaps a little bit more receptive to the products that they’re trying to sell in that setting.

New Revenue Streams

Stephanie: It’s also valid to say that for some retailers, they can use digital signage as an additional revenue stream. They can use their party advertising.

We have a very large customer down in Australia who uses it for that. Shelf-edge displays, and suchlike, whereby they use a third party, or a third party uses that as an advertising platform, and those spaces get booked up months and months ahead. It’s an additional stream for the retailer as well, for brands.

Dean: Well, actually, funnily enough, I was going to touch upon that, Stephanie, about the in-store experience. Because with the pandemic, and of course with the High Street as well, it’s difficult that people have got to keep their distance and whatnot. It’s interesting to know how the digital signage is helping in-store experiences. Can you share that with us?

Stephanie: I think pre-COVID, in-store, as Simon mentioned, retailers were using digital signage to create a different ambience. They could use it to engage. One of our clients, a High Street travel agency, they were using it to create a holiday experience. It began the moment the potential customer walked into the store: digital signage throughout the store promoting the destination, providing that experience, and also promoting it to the children as well.

A family would walk into the store and the experience, whether it was Disney or whatever, would begin the moment they walked into that store, and a lot of that was delivered by digital signage. Clearly the fixtures and the fittings of the store had a part to play in that.

But the signage, you can change obviously. You can keep it up to date. You can put live feeds on it. It brings that real-time experience into the store. The moment you start putting Disney information or Disney channels on stores, you’re just not going to get the kids out. It’s a great way to drive footfall and ensure that people stay within the store for a little bit longer than they might do otherwise if their kids are entertained.

From a branding perspective, if you’re a large retailer, you can deliver that content centrally, you can manage your brand centrally and just deliver activities out to each individual store. But you could also make it, or present it in a way that if you’re near a local airport, for instance, you can customize that content to allow it only to show offers pertinent to that local airport. You can retain the overall global brand while having that level of localization and personalization for each store. There’s lots of things you can use, it’s not just a one-size-fits-all.

New Technologies for Advanced Signage

Sarah-Jayne: I think what you’ve touched upon is real personalization and a bespoke solution for consumers, and also for obviously the distribution networks behind the signage. How does Intel factor into this?

Simon: Intel give us the horsepower. No matter what size the screen, and we’ve discussed the variety that we have in that sense, there’s always at least one of our media players, and within each of those media players is an Intel CPU.

It’s also a key part in making sure that we’re offering something that’s reliable. We can’t have screens that are blank on any of our networks. The Intel technology ensures that we have the reliability that all of our customers expect of us. So, 24/7, even beyond that 24/7/365, we can have these Intel-powered media players running reliably with no downtime.

Sometimes that’s really important. In some cases, it may be in really quite hazardous environments: offshore oil and gas, where it’s really difficult to service a piece of equipment. You’ll find our technology is working in that kind of environment.

Airports are notoriously challenging, and they really reap the benefits of the reliability and 24/7/365 operation. It’s very impractical to get a service technician within an airport should a screen, a player, need some kind of maintenance. So it’s something that our customers have found extremely powerful and useful within our system, utilizing the Intel technology.

They can put those players behind the screens, way up high in the airport, and leave them there happily for many years, and they’re going to run reliably and securely and not need any maintenance in many cases.

Dean: Are your displays network-connected or internet-connected such that if a display is faulty or part of a display is faulty, it will transmit to you and say, “Hello. I’m having a problem here. Can you come out and fix me please?”

Simon: The system is intelligent in that sense. It’ll generate alerts for various conditions. If a player was to go offline, then we can detect that, and we can send an alert to a service department to troubleshoot it.

We can often sense the status of the display as well. If a display panel goes off, we can generate alerts also. Even down to perhaps somebody who’s responsible for running the content and getting content to those screens. Perhaps they’ve uploaded an image that’s corrupted and fails to play.

We handle that gracefully. We can pass straight past the image or the piece of content that’s problematic straight onto the next piece with no gap. But we can also generate an alarm to the relevant person to tell them that this particular player didn’t play that image, and quite often we can identify why that was the case as well.

Dean: So you haven’t quite reached the self-healing facet of technology where it can sort itself out?

Simon: In some cases, it can. If the content is somewhat more complex, maybe there’s some HTML content that’s starting to slow the system down; we detect that and we can restart things. There’s a lot of preventive care that the system will do intelligently.

If it determines that something’s stopped responding as it should do, we can either move onto the next playlist item and resolve things that way. More often than not, we can manage those situations without the customer ever being aware. Should we need to, the system can reset itself, but, again, that’s very rarely required. In most cases, we can handle that kind of issue either by not allowing incompatible content to be uploaded in the first place, or handling it gracefully when it is attempted to play on there.

Camera-Equipped Displays

Sarah-Jayne: Regarding camera-equipped displays, what kind of new business models do you think they enable?

Simon: There’s definitely some very interesting opportunities with integration to cameras and other types of sensors for digital signage. We very recently brought a solution to market which utilizes just that.

We’re using cameras as a sensor to measure occupancy, and that’s particularly useful in helping manage social distancing. We can integrate with a camera that allows us to determine the number of people within a specific area, and then using the tools already built into our content management system and our digital signage products, we can dynamically change the content according to the occupancy level.

That might mean when the retail store or the restaurant or the canteen is well below its capacity limit, we can present a very welcoming message, a big green thumbs-up: “Welcome to the store. Come on in.” As the area becomes busier, perhaps even reaches the limit of capacity, we can instantly change that message to say, “I’m afraid this area is currently at maximum occupancy. Please wait a few moments for somebody to leave.”

We can integrate with various types of sensors. So if there is an API within a system that we can gain access to, then we can easily position an appropriate digital sign on each level of a carpark, notifying where there’s space, where there isn’t space.

We do similar things conceptually in other settings, for example, a library in a university. We have various customers where, as you enter the library, there is a screen that will tell you how many computers are free within each area of the library. You don’t have to wander around hoping to happen upon an available space; you can see that information dynamically on-screen.

There’s benefits to the consumer, in that case a student or a member of staff, in being able to self-serve that request. But I think also for the institution there’s an advantage because there’s less reliance upon approaching members of staff to ask relatively trivial questions. People are able to self-service in that sense.

It is very effective for the retailer in that case, or the bar operator, because there are certain environments where actually counting occupancy can be quite a challenge. If there are multiple entrances and exits to the same space, it’s quite a challenge, without suitable technology, to have staff counting people in and out to maintain a certain level of occupancy.

Using this technology, we can do it dynamically. We can integrate with these cameras that are really smart and are aware of how many people are within that space at any given time, regardless of how many entrances and exits there are.

That can ensure that the retailer never finds themself in a situation where they are over capacity. They can maintain compliance in that sense, but they can also do it in a way that’s cost-effective and efficient, because certainly having members of staff spending their whole working day on a doorway counting people in and out is not the most efficient use of human resources, and they can be repurposed.

Managing Costs

Sarah-Jayne: You touched upon a point there that’s so important. It’s about cost-efficiency these days because so many businesses are struggling, and having to have staff do jobs that your system can do very effectively, and cost-effectively, is, I’m sure, an absolute godsend to a lot of businesses in the hospitality region, and retail for that matter. Can you give us an example of some stores where this has been the case?

Simon: Definitely. I think one of the things that was interesting in the early stages of lockdown and social distancing becoming a daily reality was how quickly those policies can change. I recall an interview on the news where a retailer, a relatively small retailer, had to outlay an investment to put signs around their store to say “Please stay within a certain distance” or not go any closer, only to find within a few weeks that the detail of that policy had changed. For them, it meant all of the investment that they’d put in creating these printed and physical artifacts was laid to waste.

Digital signage is completely effective in that sense, and we know many of our existing customers are using it to make sure that the content and the messaging is bang up to date, and you can do that instantly. It doesn’t matter how many times the government or the institution, the retailer, changes their policies with regards to social distancing, or any other factor, you can very quickly go into the platform, make the changes to the messaging, whether it’s three meters, two meters, one meter, and make those changes and roll them out nationwide, globally, within an instant.

It demonstrates a degree of responsibility, I think, if, as you’re approaching a retail store, you’re faced with some content that’s reminding you about social distancing. You also know that everybody else who’s gone into that space has had the same reminder. I think it’s a good, positive message for companies to present to their consumers, and shows that they really are taking this safety issue seriously.

Monitoring Occupancy

Dean: You mentioned about occupancy before. Can you determine redundancy, whether an office space or part of an office space is being used?

Simon: Absolutely. A lot of the technologies that we’ve already discussed in a retail setting are applicable in more of a corporate office setting and, in fact, many of the retail customers that we service not only use our technology in their front-of-house retail stores, but they also use our technologies within the corporate headquarters for internal communications. It’s a very effective platform. In the office, an effective way of communicating policies to those employees.

Another product area that has been very successful for us and, again, this is powered by Intel, is the Reserva range of meeting room sites. Smaller displays beside meeting rooms that tell you exactly what the status of the room is. It’s always linked to your date and calendar system, so will show you in real time exactly what’s happening, what’s scheduled to happen later in the day.

The next step for us beyond the occupancy management system we’ve already described, where we can trigger the content on the screen itself, the next step is to integrate that within our Reserva product, where we have a nice analytics platform. At the moment there’s a range of KPIs and metrics we can show within Reserva analytics. We can show you which rooms are very popular, which rooms are not so popular, based on utilization. If a room is available for 10 hours, and it was only used for five hours, then we can then report that kind of data back.

The interesting advantage looking forward, when we bring sensors into that, is not only can we show a utilization, but we can also demonstrate occupancy. Let’s say one of your meeting rooms is utilized 80% of the time. That might feel like a really strong return on investment in that sense.

But with these sensors, and very soon we’re looking at integrating with the analytics platform the capability to show how many people were in that room on average over that period, or what the maximum occupancy level was, and in that scenario your meeting room with 80% utilization perhaps never gets above 50% occupancy, in which case you can start to make some decisions about adjusting the design of the working environment, as simple as putting a divider down the middle of the room and getting two rooms for the price of one at half the size.

New Frontiers in Signage

Dean: Is there anything else you’d like to discuss?

Simon: I guess one thing just to touch upon, when I introduced ONELAN at the start, I mentioned that ONELAN in part of the Uniguest group. We’ve been very successful in developing technologies across retail, universities, corporate communications.

But across the broader Uniguest group, we’ve got technologies, engagement technologies that are very prevalent in a range of other verticals. Particularly in hospitality, in hotels, conferencing centers, we have a number of solutions relevant there.

Also, in sports stadiums there’s quite a nice market where Tripleplay, which is another one of the Uniguest group, is very prevalent. I probably can’t namedrop too many of the exact stadiums where we find those technologies, but certainly the majority of Premier League football stadiums, and many more further afield outside the U.K., are utilizing technology within the Uniguest group, not only for digital signage, but also for streaming live feeds of sports events, and getting that to the non-pitch-facing areas of a sports stadium.

Dean: You manage all the signage around that as well? I don’t profess to know too much about rugby. Despite being a Welshman or football, I don’t get it. You do all the signage around the stadiums as well?

Simon: Stadiums is a very big part of the Uniguest group’s business. Lots of stadiums and sporting arenas across multiple sports: football, rugby, tennis, NFL, many more.

Two things that might be worth talking a little bit about. The first one was, we talked about displays of different shapes and sizes. Stephanie mentioned shelf-edge signage briefly. It’s been a very popular area of growth, and shelf-edge signage is really what it says. It’s a long, narrow, similar to a letterbox but perhaps much, much longer, display fixed on the edge of the shelf next to products.

We’ve got one of the biggest rollouts of those globally, thousands of them just deployed with a retail chain nationwide in Australia. Really interesting concept, allowing a retailer to get that content and promotional content about a product right next to the product itself. They particularly run that as an advertising network within their stores. They will sell advertising slots to all of the brands that are represented within the drugstore, in this case. It’s been incredibly successful for them.

The shelf edge is only the latest addition to their advertising network. They have large-format digital signage. They’ve got external street-facing displays, as well. It’s very simply a case of supply and demand. They’re booked out at least 12 months in advance for these advertising slots, because the brands know how effective they are. They’ve been looking for more inventive ways of installing displays that can carry advertising within the retail environment, the latest of those being the shelf-edge displays. Really effective for them.

It’s quite amazing when you see a shelf unit from top to bottom with one of these narrow shelf-edge displays on each shelf, and I think that’s definitely something we can see growing in the future.

Dean: That surely is a tick in the box for sustainability, right? Because normally when you go into a store with the shelf signage, it’s usually a plastic thing with a bit of paper written on saying this is £1.99 or something. But with a shelf signage, you’ve got now the electronic version of it and you can update that ad hoc, and there’s no wastage.

Simon: You can have it scheduled long in advance with all the correct content. Content can already have been pre-distributed down to the players. At exactly the time, date, and minute and second that you want that content to go live, you can have it scheduled to immediately then appear on all the screens connected to your network.

Dean: To hear your story about digital signage is great to hear, and to learn more about it because I think the great thing about that technology, it’s taken for granted.

We walk down the street and just see these things happen around us and we just see them, we just absorb them. I think that’s a great thing about technology. When you don’t have to think about technology and it’s there, part of your life, and it’s everyday and you don’t have to think about it, that’s when technology is winning.

The path to digital transformation is much easier when you have a trusted guide—one who not only understands the challenges of the retail industry but also appreciates the unique character of your business.

Learn how you can chart your journey in this interview between technology power couple Sarah-Jayne and Dean Gratton, and experts from CDW, a leading multi-brand provider of digital transformation solutions for the retail industry and beyond. You’ll discover how to make a business case for digital transformation, and why Internet of Things (IoT) technology is critical as you use a building-block approach to speed deployment and cut costs.

(To listen to the full interview, check out our podcast Retail Tech Chat Episode 4. For more on this topic, read the article Why Retailers Should Embrace Digital Transformation.)

The Evolving Role of Retail Tech

Sarah-Jayne Gratton: What does CDW do, and what’s your role there?

Jane Liston: We’re a global organization, a value-added reseller with an 18-billion-pound turnover. What we do is work with our clients around end-to-end solutions, covering hardware, software services, and cloud. That’s us in a nutshell. My role is to lead our retail strategy, so I’m responsible for our go-to-market, building out our retail practice, and how we remain as credible as possible and support our retail customers.

Dean Gratton: Matt, what about you? What do you do?

Matt Browne: I’m a solution specialist at CDW. I tend to focus on digital transformation and innovation and just making sure our customers are getting the right solution, and that it’s going to deliver on their business needs.

Background for me is software development as a standard. I did a master’s degree in artificial intelligence, as well. From there, I moved forward into the innovation space with CDW, helping to pilot that within the business and bring those sorts of solutions in. We’ve covered everything from RFID to computer vision, to hybrid cloud and anything beyond that we’ve had a hand in.

Sarah-Jayne: What role do you see AI playing in the future of retail?

Matt: I think it plays a key role in certain elements. I don’t for one minute see a holographic AI welcoming me into a store anytime soon, as per iRobot or some other sci-fi publication. But I do see AI providing a huge amount of resource to companies who want to leverage the intelligence they can get from either data generated by the store, or data generated by endpoints on video and audio within the store to actually improve upon customer experience, rather than sit there in the front of the store doing nothing more than telling me I’ll have nice glasses on or a nice hat, for example.

Jane: I think the challenge sometimes is at the moment where people have got stretch budgets, where do you invest? And where’s going to give the biggest return? Some of these give amazing in-store experiences. You can see how it’d be great for retailers. But is it something that they can get the business case to stack up on? It’s the same with the safety solutions in store.

We did a lot of work around that, where we’ve got quite a good portfolio of social distancing solutions using visual and different technology to do that. But it’s a big investment, and at the moment do retailers need to be spending in that area? So it’s a real challenge for them, how they manage this and where they use budgets at the moment.

Dean: What is the approach to technology in the retail environment currently?

Matt: It starts with actually defining the business and functional requirements of what the technology needs to do. I think gone are the days of technology for technology’s sake. It’s about defining what is the problem. Is it too much theft? Do you want to rationalize the supply chain? Is it customer engagement? Whatever it might be.

That opens up all the relevant doors to technology into retail, whether it’s computer vision, RFID, Bluetooth, or it could be as simple as just improving a network in a store. That’s all a technology investment for a retailer. And it’s actually about what does the business require, because we’ve all seen pretty shiny things that we want to put in place, we’ve all got gadgets coming out of our ears.

I’m sure it’s that ROI for customers. So it’s building that definable ROI initially on requirements and then opening the doors to tech from there.

Real-World Benefits

Dean: How do you work with Intel^® to help retailers with their journey?

Matt: I think the way we work with Intel to try to bring technology into retail is we leveraged them on a couple of planes. I think the first one is that they have an immense amount of power and reach globally from both a business perspective and a technology perspective. I think the leadership that they can bring is invaluable to any organization.

It doesn’t matter how big you are, whether you’re five guys in a garage, or 10,000 people in Canary Wharf—the value that those guys can bring. And then I think also their research and development that they put into technology and testing technology, and being able to showcase that without having ourselves having to do as much research. We still need to research the technology.

Dean: Having worked in R&D myself, it’s really valuable when a customer can actually touch something and hold something in their hands. Where they actually see something working right in front of them.

Jane: I think what’s become even more important, too, is over the past six months when life’s changed immeasurably for all of us, and we’re working in a much more disconnected way where we’re not going to big trade shows, getting together at workshops and customer events, that ability to connect and still get a global view.

So where we work with Intel and CDW, we’ve got a lot of global clients sometimes being able to share that insight of what’s been happening in the Far East, what are the emerging trends to help share that information with our UK-based retailers, and to help guide them and provide those insights that people just aren’t getting at the moment.

Helping keep our customers connected with the wider picture and supporting them at the moment with insight, I think that’s really powerful.

Sarah-Jayne: How can you help a given merchant and find a solution that works for them?

Jane: It’s fantastic if a client wants to make an investment in magic mirrors in-store or a great in-store experience. But if the network’s not powerful enough to support that, and all of a sudden you’re having issues with taking payments, it’s more likely that that innovation project is going to fail. So it’s getting the right solution partner, but also making sure the client’s got the right foundation to make their projects a success.

Sarah-Jayne: You’ve looked for end-to-end solutions that are deployment ready so they can really hit the ground running.

Jane: Absolutely. That’s what CDW brings to the table. I talk a lot about data center to store, about how you make that end-to-end solution work. So rather than having to work with lots of different organizations, we’re able to simplify and take the complexity out of that journey.

Sarah-Jayne: But this is not one-size-fits-all, is it, in terms of your solutions? They are adaptable, in terms of the varied needs. I read or I heard somewhere the other day, you can’t solve retailers’ needs by generic solutions. They need to be more bespoke.

Matt: Exactly. And that’s the type of approach we want to take. There’s one thing for having a repeatable deliverable solution. And there’s one thing for having a custom solution for every customer.

Every retailer is different. Every business is different. And we look to take a building-block approach where we can build a solid foundation, a solid base. Then, as the individuality of each brand comes out, we can assess the right prepackaged building blocks to build their brand.

There’s 25% of pure custom branded work for that organization, whether it’s the right colors, the right look and feel for their customer, whatever that might be, so that it is a unique solution for them. But 75% of the work is built in this building-block fashion that we can then repeat, deliver, and ensure that we can support them on the journey once the technology is in there as well.

It’s one thing to sell something to somebody. It’s another thing to make sure that they’re deriving the value, and that we can make sure that that’s going to help the business continue to thrive once the technology’s implemented.

Rapid Deployment of Proven Tech

Dean: What are the Intel^® Market Ready Solutions, and how do they address these issues?

Matt: I think the Market Ready Solutions from Intel address a number of issues. I think the first one they address, which I think is beneficial to everybody, is they do the research, the testing for brands. Once upon a time, a brand would come in, and they’d want a smart mirror or a mobile pulse system, and they’d have to go out to four or five different people, get different versions, bring them into store, test them. That’s a lengthy process. It takes time. They have to do all the back-end work to deliver that.

What the Intel Market Ready Solutions do is they take all that work, and Intel does that research and that preparation and can provide a blueprint to succeed for the customer. So I want a magic mirror, here’s a magic mirror, and here’s how you deliver it. Here’s the technology that’s required. And here’s the requirements on the back-end, and here’s everything you’re going to need as a business to deliver that. I think that’s what they did really well, they have such a broad range.

So many partners feed into that range that we’ve got solutions in there. Other partners have got solutions in there, and it allows us to take the people that are doing the right things really well and accelerate them to market—and also not go down the unfortunate two-guys-in-a-garage route where they can promise the world, and it’s all there in blueprint, but it’s not been delivered in a real-world scenario.

Dean: Just one thing really quickly, what is a magic mirror?

Matt: A magic mirror is a mirror that allows you to try on clothes and interact with the store in the changing room. It has video detection, so it can impose clothing on top of you, or makeup on top of your haircuts or glasses, whatever it might be.

But also it can be touchscreen, to allow you to request the next size up, or the next size down, or a different color, or something like that. I like to call it that “what other people purchased” experience, but in a store rather than on a webpage.

Sarah-Jayne: Would you describe that as augmented reality?

Matt: In a sense, some of them are augmented reality. Some of them not. There’s a scale, but we’ve seen a lot of interest in augmented reality for things like makeup and glasses, especially at the minute, without being able to go into store to try on a new pair of glasses or try a new eyeshadow color.

Brands are looking for ways of using augmented reality to bring that either into a store, but not having to have contact with anyone or into a device, so that they can retain the customer experience for a customer: whether they’re sat in their living room or sat in traffic on the M25, they can still get to that experience.

Jane: We also speak a lot to retailers about the importance of understanding their inventory. Especially from a customer experience of “Right, that’s in the store, I’m going to there to collect it. Oh no, it’s not.” Brands don’t want that. This is where we’re seeing a lot of interest around RFID solutions, so that you can accurately manage what stocks are, so that you’ve got that confidence.

Retailers really want people to go into bricks and mortar, so they’ve got to make sure stock’s available. It helps with the whole click-and-collect piece as well, and making sure they’ve got the right level of inventory. From an operational cost perspective, you want to have the things in stock that people are buying, and not 200 pairs of the wrong jeans that aren’t popular.

Sarah-Jayne: Also, these days people tend to go out with purpose. They go out, they need to get this, they need to come back. It’s not the strolling around environment that we had before. It’s never been more frustrating than to get to somewhere and find that something you thought was going to be there isn’t there.

Jane: And I think it links a lot into where we’re seeing more retailers looking at ship-from-store, in addition to distribution centers. They know what’s in there. So when potentially an online order is placed, they’ve got the ability to ship from different locations. And often we’re seeing more demand as well from consumers.

We’ve all got a bit used to Amazon Prime and next-day deliveries. We expect that standard now, and we’re seeing that enhancement now of four-hour delivery windows. And the only way to do that is to ship from store locations.

Leveraging the Internet of Things

Dean: Do you use the Internet of Things to support that ecosystem?

Matt: Absolutely. I think that technology is more and more important. Going back to the idea of a building-block approach, having a stable platform for that technology to feed into is core to the business relying on that platform. They can say in your four-hour delivery window, “We can have that to you in four hours” and they know they can get it to the shop in two hours. And then it’s two hours from the shop to me, for example. And that’s a huge benefit to retailers being able to provide that clarity and level of information as they try to cope with whatever wave of lockdown or process needs to be in place as we move forward.

Dean: Do you see the Internet of Things adding any other value in the retail experience?

Matt: I think so. It adds value to a retailer in terms of supply chain shipments, knowing where things are, having access to information. I think it can provide huge benefit to customers as well. I know I like it when I can see a time window for delivery, for example, or I can interact with the technology within a store, from a device, something like that. And they’re all connected things in this Internet of Things to give it a broad term.

I think it’s hugely important because, one, it increases that experience in store, which obviously makes me want to go back to that store. However, when you’re then delivering data back into the business, it makes a business able to be more profitable. It allows the business to have that conversation and then move forward. So it works really well both sides of the coin.

Dean: One important aspect of the Internet of Things is the new wealth of data that’s available, and the opportunity to have this information about retailers, and the experience backed up with data. You could actually model new experiences and issues within that ecosystem because of that new data. How do you use data? How does CDW use data?

Matt: We use it for all manner of things. We use a lot of data to identify what’s working and not working for our customers where we’re seeing trends. Where Jane is out there talking to customers and getting information from them, there’s always data being captured there, and we’re able to use that to look for trends. Where should we be focusing as an organization? We have our opinion on where we should be focusing, but the industry might be going in a completely different direction, right? So it’s always good to have that data.

Dean: Only if it’s used right. I’ve worked with a lot of companies that have this enormous amount of data, and they scratch their heads. They just don’t know what to do with it.

Case Studies in Innovation

Sarah-Jayne: Can you guys give us some examples of merchants you’re working with? How are they using your technology in innovative ways?

Matt: On the data side of things, we’re working with a global cosmetics brand which, unfortunately, I cannot name. But they are doing exactly that around their supply chain. They need to know where stock is, where it’s going, how long it’s sat in a store for, how they can reduce their inventory, and how they can ship that from the store.

We have some incredibly interesting statistics from them around holding almost nine months’ worth of stock in a store based on their sale volume for that product. They just continued to order the same amount every month, because that’s all they knew. They didn’t have an accurate view on inventory. So they’re able to start actually bringing in the stock they need, rather than having boxes and boxes of stock taking up corridors.

That then enables them to have that right place, right time stock, and not be sitting on product, which then enables them to rationalize supply chain.

But then beyond that, rationalize their manufacturing process. They’re not thinking that they’re selling 500 of this shade of lipstick globally. They actually are selling 100 and people have just been over-ordering, because they thought that’s what they needed. So then the manufacturing processes is able to look at where they need to refocus their efforts and deliver value that way.

Jane: And I think it links as well into some of the loss piece as well, because obviously these are small items of high value. And you hear some very high percentage in loss rates where they haven’t been able to track the inventory in the way that they can do using this solution. So the savings are massive, and there’s been estimates that the project could potentially pay for itself within nine or 10 months, despite the scale of it, in what the savings can be.

The Value of Relationships

Sarah-Jayne: What do you think differentiates CDW from others in the marketplace, and what are your core values?

Jane: I think there’s a couple things that stand us apart. First, we supply to over 150 countries. We’ve got an amazing logistics and supply chain business, and that’s such a core element for retailers. Getting new kit to store is such a headache, especially with different currencies and different challenges and the cultural differences. That’s the massive value of what we can do with simplifying that.

For us, it’s about partnerships as well: really understanding our customers, their brand, their business challenges. Because they’ve not just got the world of bricks and mortar. They’ve got corporate, they’ve got e-commerce, they’ve got such a complex landscape, and they’re being pressed very hard on operational costs.

And if we can help fast-track some of the innovation conversations by our knowledge, working with Intel on the Market Ready Solutions, and then harnessing CDW core skills around infrastructure and data centers, package up a complete solution—I think that’s really powerful, too.

It’s about the relationship, understanding the business, and at the moment, also being there for people. It’s tough times, and we’re all people at the end of the day.

Dean: How did you begin your journey with Intel?

Matt: My journey with Intel began about four years ago, and it came at an interesting time. CDW had just finished purchasing Kelway, and we were coming into the fold as part of the CDW family. At that time we were spinning up a shadow digital transformation team within the organization. It just so happened at that time that Intel was putting more attention into Kelway or CDW UK.

It was a match made in heaven, because the guys from Intel really wanted to do some interesting work with us. We really wanted to get into some interesting work. And so we just were drawn together through that process. It started slowly and over time we’ve just built that partnership up. It’s been a fantastic relationship.

The events of 2020 completely redefined the concept of the customer experience. Now when consumers venture out to a store, they expect to be rewarded with an experience that justifies the trip.

Digital media plays a pivotal role in creating this experience. To learn how retailers can put this tech to work, power couple Sarah-Jayne and Dean Gratton interviewed experts from Beaver Trison, a specialized retail and hospitality agency that serves companies including ODEON, IKEA, Costa, and Premier Inn. Their conversation explores the ways to deliver highly targeted content that motivates purchases.

(To listen to the full interview, check out our podcast Retail Tech Chat Episode 3.)

Digital Trends in the Store

Dean Gratton: What does Beaver Trison do, and what is your role?

Peter Critchley: Trison Group, which is the Spanish parent company of Beaver Trison, is the No. 1 digital integrator in Europe and is our parent company. We, like they, provide digital platforms and customer experiences for our customers.

I help lead the strategic role, working with other key parts of the group to make sure that what we do is at the forefront of current digital trends and is helping our customers get through very difficult times like this, using digital platforms to service their customers.

Dean: How do you identify digital trends?

Peter: It’s by doing the operational elements of the work that we do. A lot of companies just produce a product to sell it. We are actually delivering solutions on behalf of our customers.

We feel the same operational challenges that they have, and we’re in almost a symbiotic relationship with them. We’re very much part of their team. It enables us to really see where requirements are, what solutions are needed, and what platforms can alleviate some of the challenges.

The Evolution of Digital Signage

Sarah-Jayne Gratton: How do you think the role of digital signage is evolving in these times?

Peter: Over the years, people have evolved it to become much more capable with content and video. But, truth be known, it really needs to evolve significantly now.

There are only really a few players in this space who have the pedigree to use the opportunities that digital surfaces present. I think the evolution of it now is toward much more intelligent digital surfaces or digital signage and using IoT, using machine learning, thinking about how it can be extremely dynamic and contextual.

It’s got to add value. Wherever you are, whether it’s in retail, or cinema, or hospitality, people are looking for experiences. The digital platforms, kiosks, signage, and mobile platforms offer an opportunity to create a really joined-up customer experience.

It’s much less about digital signage these days. Really, we should be talking about the why. Why are we doing what we’re doing? What is the best way of achieving that? Then, how do we do it? That’s the technology play at the end that should be delivering on the why that we’ve got.

Sarah-Jayne: Are we evolving toward that very personalized involvement?

Peter: Making it feel personal is much more about relevancy. It’s not so much about, did you search for washing machines on Google, and now every time you go to any website, all you see are washing machine adverts.

It’s more about, are you furnishing your home? Are you looking for a new kitchen? Is this a space that you’re looking to develop? Let’s think about learning more about people, so that you can make the experience more personal and relevant and not annoying.

We’ve all been in that situation where you’ve seen an advert for something, and it’s like they’ve read your mind and you go, “That’s amazing. I absolutely have to buy this right now.” Every brand is trying to get to that moment with every customer and every consumer that they’re trying to engage with.

I think the journey begins before you go anywhere near a retail store, and the retailer needs to start to think about how they can understand better the customers that are walking through the door and then address them appropriately.

The technology is connecting apps to store devices and to content delivery networks that will cover a broader spectrum of display methods, and it’s linking it to environments and preferences and colors and ensuring that people that are talking to you have an insight.

The New In-Store Experience

Sarah-Jayne: How do you think shopping patterns are changing in the wake of this pandemic?

Peter: I think that the really reassuring thing is that people want to go to shops. We went through a lockdown where we weren’t allowed to go out at all really, apart from our hour of exercise, certainly in the UK. As soon as we were allowed to go to shops, there were queues. I thought that was really great.

But online has gone up. It represents about 30% now, 35% of all shopping, of all retail, and it’s had about a 10% boost since lockdown. But it’s not replaced the retail experience, and experience is the key piece here. It’s much more about experience adding value to that journey that someone’s made to go to a physical space and then making it relevant and making it entertaining. This should be a joyful experience.

We’ve got to try harder in retail, and there’s a demand for it. If you don’t have that product and yet you’re promoting it in the window as part of this current season, there’s not a lot of forgiveness for that.

I think that’s a good thing for retailers, in a way, because they know that the percentage of people who are going to be purchasing is higher. There may be fewer of them, but their efforts are more rewarded for it. So I think the other thing we’re going to start to see a lot more of is the centralization around larger stores. Having lots of smaller stores is probably not going to persist.

Flagship Store vs. Pop-ups

Peter: I think there’ll be much larger experience-led locations. Whether they’re out of town or in city centers, I think both would apply, but there’ll be investment into these bigger—I want to call them multi-flagship stores.

Then pop-ups will be another trend that we’ll start to see a lot more of, where there’ll be focus around high-activity areas or events, and brands will be using digitally enabled pop-ups to engage with people in a similar way they would at these multi-location flagships that they’ll have.

Dean: What do you mean, Peter, by pop-up stores?

Peter: There’s going to be a lot of real estate that isn’t going to be used over the coming 12, 18, 24 months, and I think that there’ll be certain brands that would benefit from using those for brand building for shortish periods of time.

If you’re thinking about winter clothing, and you’re a brand that makes winter clothing, you might well take over a small sub-1,000-square-foot space but put very large LED screens in maybe around the walls. You might invest in floor-based LED as well to create an immersive environment, and you won’t really have a lot of stock there.

You won’t be selling products, per se. It’ll be a brand experience which you can then lead people to. Maybe it’s through interactive devices or contactless engagement through eye tracking or what have you, which then is a walk-away. It’s a brand connection that then leads to a purchase either in-store, through an online purchase, or post-experience when they’ve followed up through the contacts by the brand.

Those can move around. There’s been a bit of that with some of the forward-thinking brands. But I think there’ll be a lot more of it now where you’ll have almost a roadshow, but it’s going pop-up to pop-up. It’s spending a few weeks at a particular location.

Whether it’s in Soho, or North London, or in Manchester, or Paris, or New York, those locations are going to have people with disposable income still, who are looking to engage and are looking to have these brand experiences. That’s the rethink that I think is coming.

Facial Recognition vs. Facial Analytics

Dean: You mentioned eye tracking, and of course, that leads to facial recognition. What are the differences between eye tracking and facial recognition?

Peter: They all tie together and, to be honest with you, you’re saying what everyone thinks, because it is quite confusing. When you’re looking at a camera, you have no idea if it’s a facial recognition camera or a facial analytics camera. The difference between the two is the storage of your personal data, your image, and then tying that to your personal data—name, date of birth, etc., etc.

Facial analytics is where we tend to play. Facial analytics is anonymous because we’re not storing any images at all, though it’s a camera. It’s often referred to as computer vision.

Computer vision is using a camera to show you something, and then the computer analyzes it and turns that into data. It compares you to a data model, your face to a data model, and then it will assign gender, age, emotion, state, and various other things.

These models are pretty accurate these days. Intel OpenVINO is a platform that we use for this technology. It enables a very rich environment for you to understand who, in broad generalized groups, you’re looking at, and also the numbers that you’re looking at.

You can use that data to give you an insight into where people are, what they’re doing, how long they’re looking at something, what attention you get physically with the eyes on the content or the area in store. You can use this to align it with digital campaigns that are being shown, or indeed, you can apply it in an analog world where you might have a wall of shoes, and you could determine which shoes get the most attention from people who are standing in the vicinity.

Dean: How do you build up a model of a consumer’s experiences so you can actually target products more effectively?

Peter: Right. You are storing it and aligning it to a person. There is a person, they’re just not personalized in that process. In this anonymized world of facial analytics or facial detection, you’re not assigning that to an individual, but you are assigning it to a person.

You know that a person, a male, 42 years old, stood in front of this space and looked at four different sets of shoes and dwelled particularly on the Nike and then turned right. That’s an experience that that person had. If they turned right, the chances are that they were going off to this area.

You can then connect the chances of a 42-year-old male, who you’ve just literally measured in the shoe section and three seconds later he falls into the camera detection area for the till. It’s likely that it’s the same person. Those are the kind of processes that you can start to build up. It’s great for brands because they don’t have to think about GDPR. They don’t have to worry about the potential pushback from customers.

There are opportunities to then tie that into a more personalized experience. You can, for example, have a screen that people are looking at and engaging with and present a QR code that would then tie you into an app. The app experience could then link you. Then suddenly you can tie what they were doing and looking at to the actual person. So you can then personalize that experience further, obviously with their permission.

One of the things that this industry, our industry, has to do better is tell people what we’re doing. We have to explain it to people and say, “This is what we’re doing and this is how it works. This is the benefit to you.” Because there is a lot of mistrust of technology. This industry has to work harder at building. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be telling people what we’re doing, because it’s actually for everyone’s benefit.

Measuring the Experience

Sarah-Jayne: I really admire companies such as yours that act for the consumer but actually support brands in a way that allows them to shine.

Going back to Intel, one thing I would like to ask you is that you supported Intel at this year’s ISE in Amsterdam. You created this kind of mock coffee shop. I just want to hear more about that because that’s right up my street.

Peter: It was a demonstration of how you can utilize technology to create a more personal experience within a coffee shop. It was simple in its execution, but the way we did it was engaging. It was a good example of how content is really crucial in this. I mean, we spent a lot of time talking about data and experiences and journeys, but you know what? Content is the thing that really connects people to those experiences.

With Intel, we developed a superhero theme for the coffee shop environment. There’s an interactive kiosk where you would go and order your coffee, place your order, and type in your name. When it was ready, the barista would tap an iPad and he’d see those orders on his iPad, and he’d be then creating those drinks, and tap the name that was on the iPad. Then, there’d be a whole little content show that drove an experience for the customer, which would bring their name up and, depending on the coffee that they’d selected, it would have that character.

We were logging all of the data for that as well, so we were able to feedback to Intel or, let’s say, the coffee shop in this case: the dwell time that people had, which screens they were looking at, which animations worked better, and which ones made people happier. So there was a little data story behind that as a little proof of concept of how it all works.

Sarah-Jayne: I love that idea.

Peter: I think it comes back to a maxim which we have, which is, “Measure, measure, measure.” You’ve got to measure what’s going on, because if you don’t understand the space and the problem, how can you engage with it and fix it?

There’s so much of that needed at the moment with environments that brands are operating in, wherever they may be, that there are opportunities to measure using inexpensive equipment to really understand what people are doing in the spaces.

There’s not been that much of an imperative to do it until now, because of the times. They haven’t been amazing, but they’ve not been terrible, either. Brands have been able to focus on other things. But there is an opportunity at the moment to really kind of get down and dirty with the data of who, where, when, in terms of what people are doing to engage.

Sarah-Jayne: That’s such a great summary of it all, because it’s all about what we do every day that gives us that perfect retail experience.

Peter: The whole retail landscape will be completely different because those people, like my mum, that never really engaged too much with Amazon or really engaged too much with online delivery, suddenly have discovered it’s really not that hard and, actually, it’s pretty good.

So, the people, the businesses, the operators, the brands have recognized that it’s not going to be the same, people have changed, their perceptions of where risk lies has changed, their demands and expectations within retail have changed, and the products that they want to engage with and buy haven’t changed enormously—but the way that they do it has.

There’s loads of opportunity and you’ll see that playing out, I’m sure, through those that survive and those that struggle to make it through the next sort of difficult days that are ahead for retail.

Better Omnichannel Experiences

Peter: There was a big kind of inflection point with iPads and iPhone, obviously, but iPads especially. When the iPad came out, I remember very clearly people saying, “What’s the point of that? It’s just a big phone. Why would you buy one of those? I’ve got an iPhone already.” I heard that over and over and over again. And do you know what? That thing has been so successful.

It’s changed everything. Suddenly, people realized, “This is transformational. This has changed how I connect with content from all the brands and media providers that I’m used to.” And we’ve never looked back since.

The same is true, I think, at the moment, with digital and retail. I think there are opportunities for brands to really connect with the online experience and take it to the offline environment and to really properly engage with that.

We’ve done work with Made.com and others like Fujifilm and brought them into a space where their online experiences are now an intrinsic part of the offline spaces that they operate in, and turn them into a truly engaging, connected space that feels very dynamic.

That, I think, is where the digitalization of our lives has taken them significantly forward. That’s going to need to be reflected in, let’s face it, the lagging behind that we’ve seen in a lot of the High Street and the resistance to it. “It’s an expense. It’s a cost.” It’s not, actually. There’s a significant return on investment from it, if you do it the right way. And that’s the crucial bit, right, if you do it the right way.

Better Engagement with IoT

Dean: Are you seeing benefits from IoT technology?

Peter: We’re seeing a trend within retailers to engage with that. Some of them have been using these systems, whether it’s RFID or other technologies for a long time. The customer-facing side of IoT has been a little slower to engage.

So, we’re seeing this year, really, and it is now about this year, trends towards really thinking about connecting U-POS systems and making them drive a broader story through IoT.

Whether that’s going to be stock availability and how that changes the mix of content on digital surfaces. Or whether you’re thinking about how, if a customer is looking at a particular product—and we’re going back to the OpenVINO piece here—maybe that illuminates using DMX-controlled lighting that’s controlled through EdgeX equipment.

All of those sort of very subtle, but important, connections that make you feel better and engage you with the space that you’re in, I think are becoming really practical and usable for retailers. I can’t see a downside to that, really.

Dean: Yes, and seamless and transparent, because ultimately with new technology for the consumer, you shouldn’t know it’s there. It should just be seamless, transparent. You just enjoy the experience.

Peter: The digital retail environment is not about in your face. It goes back to what I was saying about, it feels personal, but it’s not personalized. It’s not trying to address me and say, “Hey, Peter. This is what you’d love. This is great for you.”

What it is doing, though, is in my periphery. It’s showing me things that I’m interested in, but it’s not driving me and saying, “You’ve got to look at this. This is amazing. This is for you.”

It’s this call to the space and the physical that’s very attractive that makes people go to these retail spaces. The way that digital works needs to be seamless, frictionless, not in your face, quite subtle and engaging, but in a non-confrontational way. That’s where you’ll get brand engagement on a level that is meaningful.

The pandemic has created new sensitivities around interpersonal contact—and nowhere is that truer than in the retail and hospitality sector. Happily, new touchless retail technologies are helping merchants make their businesses safer, more comfortable, and more efficient.

To discover how the industry is deploying these advances, technology power couple Sarah-Jayne and Dean Gratton interviewed experts from BlueStar, a leading distributor of mobility, point-of-sale, and security solutions. They discussed the ways the checkout experience is evolving to meet new expectations, why technologies like RFID are critical today for store operations, and how leading retailers use these technologies.

(To listen to the full interview, check out our podcast Retail Tech Chat Episode 2.)

Know Your Stock

Dean Gratton: What does BlueStar do, and what is your role?

Gordon Atkins: I am Retail & Hospitality Technology Hardware Specialist at BlueStar. We are a solutions distributor. We work with different manufacturers, bringing their items together, and putting them into solutions available for resellers, ISVs, or anybody to take to market, to help solutions in retail, hospitality, warehousing, and other areas.

Sarah-Jayne Gratton: Retailers are looking for innovation to make sure, with potentially reduced staff levels, that they’ve got means for tracking things. And I also think that retail is moving forward so much into a data world. Would you agree with that?

Gordon: Oh, definitely. We’re in a real-time world now. And when people say, “Have you got it?” We’re wanting to know right now if they have it or not. For me, the expectations of technology and the expectations of retailing now is for that to be available and to find that information, at hand, instantly. The tools are there, so why not have it working perfectly for the customer?

Sarah-Jayne: Absolutely. And things have changed so much over the past six months. How do you think the pandemic has changed the retail landscape, and what do you think merchants need to do differently?

Gordon: I think this year, the huge growth in the online presence of everybody is showing the way that people that would normally go to the High Street to have a look, have been shopping online and have potentially new trends where they have enjoyed shopping online.

The stock calibration between the two needs to be there. If the stock’s not there, is there a chance for them to sort of showroom those items—have some on a demo rail where people can go, “I just needed to try an 8,” regardless of color, regardless of availability?

The experience needs to be there in retail. If you go in your car, driving into a town to the High Street, if you’re on a quick mission, no problem at all. But if you’re looking for something that’s different, you want the help. You want the advice. You want an experience when you go shopping.

The Future of the High Street

Dean: Do you think the High Street still has a future? We’ve seen a lot of High Street stores close as a consequence of online stores such as Amazon.

Gordon: The High Street is always going to be there. The shopping experience is always going to be there, because some things you just can’t do online. And sometimes you just want to go, and try and collect it, and get it now quickly, and the High Street is a great way of doing that. For me, it’s always going to be there. It just needs to revive itself, have a bit more of an experience feel.

Sarah-Jayne: How do you think that stores can enhance the event aspect of shopping? If you go out as a family, you want to have this experience. Wouldn’t you agree, Gordon?

Gordon: Yes. There are times at the moment that we rush in, we rush out. But after this, to get the High Street and everybody back moving again, when everybody’s happy and we can have the way it was together, it makes perfect sense.

There’s thousands of variations and things you can do, but it all actually does help in its own little way. And for me, customer service and experience are the key things that High Street needs to see. Let the customer buy online, in store, via their normal card payment or something like that, if there’s not the stock available. People are willing and looking for that type of environment. It’s about having options at the moment.

Evolution of Payment Methods

Dean: And with that in mind, do you think the evolution of transactions and how they occur, do you think that’s going to change?

Gordon: Yes, to be honest. The use of phones as payment devices now is growing dramatically.

A bit like online banking, isn’t it? Some people stayed away from online banking for a while, then they all of a sudden had to download an app, and before they knew it, they were like, “Well, I’m not going back in the bank anymore. This is much easier.”

Dean: I think it’s about education and confidence in the technology that you’re using on a daily basis. And I think the wider it’s accepted by the masses, the more confident people become with it.

Gordon: Customer service is key, regardless of the person. You’ve got to cater to different needs at the moment. Some people just want a quick self-service, two items and out. Some people want that.

Dean: I suppose it’s trying to achieve that balance. Do you see always a need for staff service desks or kiosks at the shopping?

Gordon: At this present time for me, it’s offering everything to the customers, because there are different levels of customers at the moment. To say everybody must queue up, everybody must go for this process, is a little bit odd in today’s world.

Sarah-Jayne: I think you’re absolutely right, Gordon. It’s about choice, isn’t it? And it’s about making sure that everybody has the best experience that they can have.

Gordon: The customer will tell you what he wants, or what they want, when they want it. Just listen to the customer. They’re always your main source of income, your main source of what you’re looking for.

RFID, AI, and Technology Galore

Sarah-Jayne: In terms of the operations side and improving that, should stores put a higher priority on technologies like RFID? We’ve already talked about stock supplies and tracking those and making those better. Should real-time inventory tracking be a higher priority do you think, Gordon?

Gordon: Yes. Inventories have always been a bit of a nightmare for retailers, keeping them up to date. And yes, when you look at RFID as a total solution, the return on investment is there in such a strong case.

Dean: Do you use BlueStar artificial intelligence for any aspect of your technologies?

Gordon: Actually, our shelves in our new warehouse, we have been looking at some of these different ways of picking and things like that. We are starting to work with different companies and looking at different ideas ourselves. Because this technology is coming. Understanding it for different things, even as far as wayfinding and stuff like that. It’s the new technology that’s coming through that makes sense when used in the right way.

Sarah-Jayne: We’re coming to the million-dollar question here, which is, how do you work with Intel to help retailers deliver these new technologies and innovation?

Gordon: Intel has always been at the back of everything we’ve done, all the way down to the endpoints, from using Intel for servers all the way down to standard touchscreen terminals. We’re using one touchscreen terminal; we now offer from 10-inch to 65-inch in stores. There’s so much.

We forget all about this when we see, and we’re playing with the screens. But there’s a PC running behind giving it the power, giving the graphics, giving everything it needs, it’s generally Intel powered. For me, Intel’s a great team player in this. They fully understand our marketplace.

Sarah-Jayne: Can you give us some examples of the merchants that are using these technologies to find the success?

Gordon: Well, if we just purely talked about the UK, I think realistically you’ll find Intel inside every single self-checkout in supermarkets, and every single checkout being used. So regardless, potentially somebody’s been close to an Intel chip being used every single week they go shopping. It’s as simple as that.

Sarah-Jayne: Yeah. So, they’re everywhere around us.

Gordon: Yes. And that’s from anything that’s computerized. Again, we forget all about our back office and warehousing, everything like that. It’s all running Intel chips.

Serving Customers of Every Generation

Sarah-Jayne: Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?

Gordon: I did a few presentations to some high-end retailers last year, and they asked me to sit down and look at their ideas. Where are we now? If they were changing things, what would they change? And yeah, I looked at it and said, “We still are, and still will be for quite some time, in that middle of certain generations—younger generations being used to things and wanting things, and older generations accepting things and understanding things.”

So, as you say, we’re still having some people wanting to go around, chat, with a trolley, fill it up, put things onto a belt, have those conversations. It’s just giving everybody opportunities.

And it’s quite strange, I’ve always remembered the Christmas tree one. For a big retailer to sell Christmas trees outside always used to be, how do we get a till point all the way outside? It’s got to be one of our normal tills. So on, and so forth. In today’s world, you can grab a payment device, grab a handheld reader, and send somebody outside in an hour.

Sarah-Jayne: I suppose that self-service has revolutionized the speed in which these people can actually think, “Yeah, I’ve got my stuff, I can go.”

Gordon: In this day and age, things don’t have to be big, all-singing, all-dancing, weighing everything. All we need to do is scan a couple of things, accept the payment, and walk out the door. Now, I can do that on a little tiny seven-inch touchscreen and have lots of these available.

Sarah-Jayne: Is there a need for sort of greater self-service during certain hours?

Gordon: Yes, but then that’s I think down to sheer numbers of acceptance for me. I think you’ll find most people, most large stores now, are actually still understanding self-service technology and growing it themselves. If you build it, they will come. If it’s there and it’s quicker, people will use it.

The Role of IoT in Retail

Dean: I just want to go off topic somewhat and talk about what we discussed the other day. And that was the Internet of Things and Near Field Communications and RFID. Do you think IoT for you, as a business, works?

Gordon: Yes, it totally does If we just talk about RFID for a moment alone. Say, for instance, I’m a retailer, and I have sort of a basket environment where the customers come up with 10 things in the basket. If I’m using barcode, I have to find 10 barcodes, position 10 barcodes, put 10 barcodes in front of a something. The sheer fact of moving my hand across it, scanning all 10, and carrying on with the transaction speeds up the whole thing for the customer and the retailer.

When you look at RFID as a whole, can I scan it? Can I have a robot going around scanning every single item, knowing where it is? Is my loss prevention being covered because I can track items better? Can I speed things up at my till point?

It’s just a quick scan of items rather than each and every single item being found. And for me, acceptance of that technology is coming, because it speeds everything up, and it makes it more accurate at the same time. Yes, historically there’s always been a cost to it. But these costs have dramatically come down as the whole world accepts RFID and NFC more and more.

I mentioned the other day, years ago when I went through the change in access control from magnetic card technology, physically swiping that card through the system, to an RFID technology, where it’s just tap the card and open the door. That was a quick, swift, easy acceptance. It’s just the rest has to follow. For me, it’s making people’s lives easier in this day and age with technology is easily done. It’s just understanding and accepting it.

Dean: And I suppose the evolution to NFC and RFID, you talked about those magnetic strips and opening doors, for example. The next step in that would be to have the Star Trek-like doors, where you approach the doors and they open.

Gordon: As you say, the technology is there. There is actually something called a UHF, Ultra High Frequency, which they use in warehousing and things like that. It gives them a longer read rate. Because if you just picked on normal RFID, like a MIFARE card or something like that, you’ve got inches read rate.

But if you picked on UHF, in theory it’s used, for instance, a pallet on a forklift truck driving through a warehouse door. That’s how it could be used. And as you say, that’s only recognizing a serial number, populating it onto a database. What that does instantly would then just give a door access, instant rewards to go, “Right. That’s been populated at this point. Let’s open that door.”

That is coming. Because why couldn’t the door know that I’m walking down the corridor, and if it’s the only door that’s there, I’m within the security parameters, open the door for me.

Even with facial recognition nowadays, it’s getting so much better and we’re linking it to different types of marketing via interactive screens to draw people in and things like that. Why wouldn’t we use this technology for easier and greater things to make our lives better and quicker and easier so we can enjoy more?

New Tech for Loss Prevention

Sarah-Jayne: In terms of loss prevention, can you give us an example of how RFID might assist in inventory tracking?

Gordon: Sure. One of the ones I use quite a bit is RFID technology, each chip has its own unique serial number so that you’re able to track everything under a batch, but every individual item within that batch. And there’s a retailer that found it was losing a certain amount in a certain area. And because they’re actually able to track each RFID chip and know which serial number moves where in the building, and what goes on with it, they were actually able to work out their loss prevention.

The items were never actually leaving the store. People were actually being so bold to come in, collect the items from the floor level, put it straight into a bag, go straight upstairs to level two where the refunds were and ask for a refund with no receipts.

Sarah-Jayne: That’s incredible.

Gordon: Yes, it’s crazy when you hear it. Because each one had a unique serial number and because they were able to keep constant tracking of the tags and the actual items where they were, they realized the items never left their store. They didn’t go to the front. They went up the escalator into this department, and then arrived on the till point.

It’s just another form of loss prevention. Again, that whole thing could be tracked from the warehouse, all the way through. So, when certain serial numbers go missing in batches, if it’s recorded all the way through, you’ll physically know without opening boxes that that item was in there at that point, and not in there at that point.

Dean: There would be a whole logistics and supply chain across all of this. Because if we have goods coming from, say, Switzerland, arriving into Brussels, then surely those goods will be tracked and known. And when they’re delivered at the warehouse, then there’ll be traceability and trackability in those products.

They should be known at any place and time where they are. Having that unique serial number for each item gives you true trackability all the way through.

Sarah-Jayne: Yes. Just total connectivity where everything is traceable.

The pandemic has completely upended the ways merchants engage their customers. Retail technology has moved to the forefront, as consumers rely more than ever on mobile apps and self-service checkouts to execute their shopping journey.

How should retailers respond to these changing circumstances? Tech power couple Sarah-Jayne and Dean Gratton put this question to the experts from Box Technologies—a leader in customer engagement that works with brands such as Sainsbury’s, HSBC, Superdry, and Pizza Hut. Here’s what they had to say.

(To listen to the full interview, check out our podcast Retail Tech Chat Episode 1. Note: Box Technologies is a subsidiary of FLYTECH, a Member of the Intel^® IoT Solutions Alliance.)

Self-Service Trends

Dean Gratton: Tell us a bit about Box and your roles there.

James Patterson: I’m the strategic sales and marketing director at Box Technologies. It’s a very customer-facing role—I look after some of our largest accounts and some of our largest partners as well. So we work with end users but a lot of software partners as well.

What does Box Technologies do? We’re known as a leader in technology solutions into the retail, hospitality, and gaming sector. Some of the technologies, which obviously we want to discuss with you guys today, there’s some really cutting-edge things around self-service technology with the integration of AI.

But we also have been working in that self-service space as a business for 20 years, much before McDonald’s had rolled out order points across all of its global businesses. Digital signage is also a huge, huge growth area for us. Everyone’s looking at how they can stand out on the High Street.

Sarah-Jayne Gratton: These days self-service has never been more prevalent, with what’s going on in the world?

James: Oh, I know. It’s fascinating. One of the things that, when the whole COVID thing took over, we sat down as a team and I, Leonard, and the other directors at the business, and we thought, “COVID. Are customers, are consumers, are they going to be afraid to interact with touchscreens that have been shared with other people?”

From our point of view, we were thinking, “Wow. This could be a big, big technology shift.” But we were working in the UK with even some of the essential retailers that stayed open during lockdown and they were running self-checkouts, self-service trials. It was really interesting on the retail side of things.

There was no impact at all. People were still really happy to go into stores and use express self-checkout lanes to complete their transactions and get out and complete the transaction as quickly as possible.

Then interestingly, on the hospitality side of our business, we had some pilots in play with some of the largest restaurant chains in the UK. COVID literally, totally shifted that whole piece of technology. So self-service has been skipped in some scenarios and replaced with order your own, bring your own device.

What we’re seeing now with a lot of customers is they’ve rapidly deployed either app-faced ordering systems or even Wi-Fi connected ordering systems. When you go into their restaurants, you join the Wi-Fi, it brings up an order screen, and then you can order, as the consumer, whatever you want on your own device.

Dean: Leonard, what do you do?

Leonard Gilbert-Wines: I have the pleasure of working in our business, but in a role that gives me the opportunity to listen and interact with our retailers, our hospitality—but also our partners, the guys who write the software, the code that is surfaced on these kiosks, on those Wi-Fi order quotes, and on traditional POS devices. So I do cover quite a lot of miles.

But I’m in the middle of all this technology and trying to solutionize it to bring it to market. One day I’m looking at ways to keep touchscreens safe and clean, whether that’s UV, whether that’s compliance, so that the managers or the section coordinators within these organizations can look, at a glance, on a device whether these devices have been cleaned, to the next day specifying maybe a lottery machine or some Wi-Fi technology.

Redefining Customer Experience

Dean: Box positions itself as a leader in customer experience and engagement. What does that mean to you, and what are the key factors in treating excellent engagements?

James: I really think, depending on the arena we’re working in, it means different things. Let’s consider a bingo hall, as an example. Traditionally, we all have that picture in our mind of going in there and everyone’s got a piece of paper with their different rows and lines on it. That’s all digital now. That’s all delivered via mobile devices.

But on those mobile devices, it’s not just your game of bingo. You can order your drinks to the table and your food and all of those sorts of things. That’s how they engage within a bingo hall, which can be very different to one of the high-end retailers we’re working with.

I think one of the best examples personally I’ve seen, and also Box has been heavily involved in, is we work with a brand globally called Aurum Holdings, which one of the sub-brands is Watches of Switzerland. It’s very, very high-end jewelry and watches. When I say high-end, these watches, some of them are a million-pounds plus.

There’s a great case study on our website about its store at 155 Regent Street. That was a flagship store that we worked on with Watches of Switzerland. The bottom floor was the entry-level brands, all the way up to your fifth-, sixth-level floor, which was invitation-only and VIP treatment.

Their customer base was going to be heavily populated with tourists, and tourists from certain geographies around the world: China, Russia, some of the Arabic nations as well.

They sat with us and said, “Okay, so how can we work our digital content, our digital experience, about targeting these customers?” One of the disadvantages is language barrier. They’ve got numerous screens throughout the store and throughout the different levels within the store. There’s a concierge, or a number of concierges, and they have tablet devices.

They can control every single one of those screens with the language. You may have a group of Chinese customers that come in, and they can change that content on level 2 all to be in Mandarin, as an example. So little things like that, really tailoring that customer experience.

Technology Is Transforming Retail

Sarah-Jayne: How do you think these technologies are changing the way that retailers and the hospitality markets are doing business?

Leonard: I can answer in probably the way you’re not expecting, and that is, there are technologies that are available to us that we have chosen not to productize, because it may be too much of a shift for the general public.

VR and AR, virtual reality and augmented reality, is kind of on the border, because there is that vulnerability that someone may feel by having their vision impaired in a public place. So you do need a very specific setting for that immersion.

Sarah-Jayne: Is that also a degree of subtlety, as well, in the way that it’s delivered?

Leonard: Yes. But we have produced similar examples with digital signage and having trigger points with maybe perfume bottles. You pick up certain scents, and then the visuals on the screen in front of you change depending on which scents and which bottles and which combinations you lift up.

James: We did a big project in the UK recently with Pizza Hut. It was around optimizing their kitchens. The sort of big tagline around it was “Deliver pizza.” I think it was “faster, hotter, and smarter.” It’s all about giving that better customer experience, so when you’re delivering a pizza, making sure it arrives hot, not cold, etc.

In their kitchens now, they installed a capacity of touchscreens where they now have a guy in the kitchen who zooms in on this interactive map to find the local drivers on their mopeds to call one back to make sure he can come and get his pizza and stuff in time.

That’s a real-life example where this type of interactive touch technology is being used in a Pizza Hut delivery site. I think we, as consumers, the way that we interact and consume technology now, it plays the biggest role in that.

Successful Retail Tech Deployment

Sarah-Jayne: How do you work with Intel to help retailers deliver these cutting-edge technologies?

James: Box is the European entity of a much larger technology group, which is called Flytech Technology. Intel, by far, is our biggest technology partner. We sell hundreds of thousands of Intel-based products a year. We work very, very closely with the guys, locally and on a global scale, looking at how we can innovate within our marketplaces.

I think of one example which, Leonard, you were obviously heavily involved in with the guys locally at Intel. There’s been a big demand from our customers over the years, in retail specifically, to mobilize the point-of-sale journey.

As an example, if you’re in a fashion or a department store, the ability to go on an assisted-selling journey with that customer throughout the store and then complete the transaction, our customers have been talking about it probably for seven or eight years. There’s always been some real technology limitations to it. One of the big ones was that whenever you undocked this POS tablet device, it was always basically one-to-one paired.

So you’d start at that customer journey, but this might be on floors, if you’re in a department store. It might be one to three. But then you’d always have to return back to that same docking station to complete the transaction, which totally vetoed the whole customer experience and what you’re trying to achieve.

We took that as a challenge. Leonard, it’s probably worth saying how you worked with the guys at Intel locally to come up with a solution and some technology, which we’re actually just bringing to market next month, which is a first as far as we’re aware in that sort of retail space.

Leonard: Yes, absolutely. We’re aware of the wireless technologies Intel’s brought to the office. There’s WiDi and WiGig. This allows you to place your laptop down on a desk, and you’re instantly connected to your monitor, to your printer, your mouse, your keyboard, any other peripherals.

There are no wires, essentially. We wanted to bring this to retail. But an office environment—where you’re talking, you’re working in maybe one or two meters around a desk—is very different to a retail environment, where you have the structure of the building, and you have many customers with their Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, a lot of radio, a lot of noise there.

We worked closely with Intel’s innovation division in Swindon in the UK, and we tested many different solutions. We landed on something that passed the test, essentially. Our test was to take the solution to a motorway service station. These are areas where people stop off the freeway, off the motorway, for their coffee. But they’re also logging onto the Wi-Fi. So it’s a very busy, noisy environment.

The task was to have a tablet, and undock that tablet, but maintain the ports, the connected devices that are connected to the hub, so the retail software doesn’t have a break. There’s no disconnection. It’s a seamless transition from physically connected to connected over Wi-Fi. We achieved that using firmware-level optimizations and also drivers, which we leveraged, as well as a custom EC chip within the hub that hosts our Wi-Fi connectivity.

The challenge is that  if you have a tablet docked, and you undock it, you lose connectivity. Those comports or USB connections disappear. You lose the scanner, you lose the printer, you lose any other peripheral you’re connected to. POS software traditionally does not like that. It will crash, and you have to reboot the device to bring them back. So we have to make that a seamless connection.

James: I think any readers who have worked in this space will understand very well. It’s been on the radar for a while. So it’s great to work with Intel to solve it.

I think another recent example we’ve been collaborating with Intel is around Intel’s OpenVINO platform and, again, within the Flytech group, we’ve got a sister company called Berry AI, which, as it says in the brand name, it’s a computer vision AI business. We work very, very closely with those guys.

Postal Service Case Study

James: One of the solutions we came up with as a collaboration was around automating the experience within a post office. People don’t go to post offices as much as they once did. But when you typically do go there now, you end up waiting in a queue.

Part of the challenge there for any postal company across the world is that there’s still a very manual human interaction process between saying, “I’ve got this parcel in my hands. What size is it? What weight is it?” which means, “This is how much I need to pay for, if it’s a letter, it’s a stamp. This is how much I need to pay for shipping.” It’s a process that, if it takes five minutes per customer, and you’ve got five people in your queue, that’s 25 minutes.

We’re not going to wait as consumers now for 25 minutes in a shop. That just doesn’t happen. So what we’ve created is basically a self-service kiosk with integrated AI, which basically takes out that requirement for this human interaction.

There are different sizes of these kiosks, depending on the parcel size, but let’s take the one version. This is any letter and any parcel that is up to a large shoebox size of any material as well, because that’s a key thing as well. Sometimes letters are paper, cardboard. Packages could be different types of plastic.

We take any of those parcels or letters, you place it on our kiosk platform and then within seconds, the camera, the AI, kicks into place and comes up on the screen and says, “By the way, Sarah, you owe us 50p to send this parcel. Please tap your card. We’ll print you off a label. Stick your label on your parcel, and just please put it in that dispatch bin over there.” And you’ve cut down that process, which at minimum, I’m probably being cautious here when I say five minutes. You’ve cut down that process to 20, 30 seconds.

Leonard: That is a great example of leveraging that computer vision with OpenVINO, pairing with a weigh scale, and then essentially just giving a location for a customer to place that parcel, and then giving them those options: “Do you want silver service, next day, three-day service?” Prints a ticket. It allows the counter, then, to spend the time for maybe checking my passport application, insurance documents. They’re the skills that the members of staff want to spend time with the customers for those extra services.

James: I think that’s a great point, just to sort of wrap that bit up on the postal side of things. Post offices now, with their retail spaces, to survive, they don’t make much money on returning parcels or letters. That’s just the service that they provide. Where they make the money is things like holiday insurance, passport returns, all of those services that they offer to the customers.

In the UK, it’s expensive. They’ll probably offer 150 different services, too, but they’re the ones that take human interaction, and it’s like you said, it frees those people to make those profitable service engagements.

The Hype and Reality of AI

Dean: What does artificial intelligence mean for you?

James: I think when we look at any technology, and I think let’s bring AI into the mix as well, we always start off with: What is the problem we’re trying to solve? And can we use elements of our technology suite to help solve that problem, not just for technology’s sake?

What we say to any of our customers that are going on pilots or even adopting this type of technology at scale, it’s not just about the technology. You have to go through an implementation process as a business with your customers.

One of the biggest shifts that we saw in our core markets was when supermarkets suddenly decided that they were going to introduce self-checkouts. Everyone stayed, and I was one of them. I would literally avoid them like the plague.

Then supermarkets went, “Okay. Initially, what we’re going to do is we’re going to put a couple of people around the technology. We’ll show you how to use it.”  Once we’ve seen, and once we’ve done something once, twice, three times, it becomes second nature, and then we adopt it.

So yeah, I think it’s as much about the technology, but how you implement that, and how you take your customers on that journey. Technology, just put out in isolation, never has the success that people hope it will.

Reducing Maintenance Headaches

Sarah-Jayne: How are you dealing with the upkeep side of things?

James: Let’s take a supermarket. It has all of these devices, all of these computer devices, whether they’re till points, whether they’re mobility tablets, whether they’re digital signage screens, whether they’re back-office workstations. Now, any of these computer devices, they’ve got thousands of these across their estate.

Currently, a lot of them don’t have a single view, a basic form, of all of their connected devices. So when something goes wrong, let’s say till point 1 has an issue, the current process is someone in that store has to notice that there’s a problem, and then they’ll ring up their service desk. There’s a bit of human interaction, a bit of triaging.

Then they can’t fix it over the phone. They then log a call with the engineering team. They then put a part in their van, and they drive to the store and fix it. That is the process that, like I said, has been carried out for a long period of time.

The reality is, just throwing more people at it, one, adds cost to the service, which in this current climate, everyone is looking at how they can save costs. But two, there’s no use of technology there, really. How can we use technology to improve this?

So now the AI we discussed earlier will be continuously monitoring the supermarket’s connected estate. If it notices that something’s wrong—let’s just take an example: till one’s screen’s not turning on for whatever reason. Before the human intervention, there’ll be a number of steps that the application will go through to try to fix that problem.

With machine learning, it would start to prioritize those steps depending on what are the common trends that the application sees within that particular retailer. So that’s one side of it.

The other part it brings, because everything is connected, is life-cycle management of those devices. We can then look at, if you took a traditional supermarket, they may have 10 rows of tills. Rows 1 to 3 are probably used 75% of the; 3 to 6 may be 50% of the time; 6 to 10 is only 25% of the time.

Currently, it’s very difficult for any retailer or any customer to look at that, and go, “Okay. This is the life cycle I’ve got left.” Our system gives you that. Then you can rather than go and buy all new devices, swap tills 6 to 10 with 1 to 4 and get more out of your hardware platforms.

Where we’re at currently is we know that we can solve 36%, at minimum, of what would have been engineers arriving at a site with a part in their van. We all live in an environmentally friendly world now.

Leonard: Yeah. I think just to add to that, James, is the key role of that service is the investment in these devices, they need to work. We want to maximize that uptime. Anytime a device is removed from site, which is faulty, in quotation marks, it goes on its own journey to a repair center, then has miles in carbon footprint added to that.

You mentioned vPro and AMT technologies. There’s a part to play with those technologies. But we do have devices that don’t qualify for those technologies. So we are writing our own custom firmware to surface that information. It’s not as shallow as a utility on Windows. It goes up to the cloud and right down to the metal on our devices.

Dean: Is there anything else you guys want to touch upon before we conclude?

James: I think we’ve covered a really broad area across the self-checkout side of things and innovation there. AI through self-service kiosks. We’re also developing certain AI cameras for vertical markets as well. The engagement around mobilizing devices and point-of-sale devices, and what we said there around changing the game, delivering smart service to our customers.

More than 2,000 years ago, the ancient Greek sophist Gorgias of Leontini attested to the power of communication, the importance of connectedness, and the weightiness of a single word. A word, he explained, “is a great ruler. With a small and invisible body, he knows how to do divine things.”

More than a tool for communication, words bind us in our humanity insofar as they enable us to share our opinions, show care, and even communicate with and influence objects.

In our modern times, designers try to simulate and engage the senses with each passing technological innovation. Instead of having to interface with a keyboard or touchscreen, artificial intelligence is being applied to everyday objects and activated through words. A computer simulation—or “edge intelligence”—enables an object to understand a given language and respond in kind.

Without delving into the more technical details, I want to share how mere words can significantly impact business processes, daily operations, and customer service in retail stores.

No doubt, we’ve all experienced the frustration of trying to get information about a product from a new hire or a temporary worker. From the endless chain of phone calls to the “one more minute” refrain, the entire interaction can be unnerving and time-consuming.

Now, imagine that same operator is wearing a small device—one that’s connected with colleagues, the company’s database, and is capable of extracting every piece of information on a product. This interaction would take an entirely different form. You’d have all of the answers to your questions in a matter of seconds. Quite simply, this subtle—almost invisible—device would allow retailers to be the next best thing to omniscient.

A device like that exists and has a name: Theatro.

A New Approach to Retail Communications

Theatro connects each member of a team to another and to critical enterprise apps through the power of their voices. Even though it’s as simple to use as a two-way radio, a retail communications device harnesses the power of both human and cybernetic knowledge to understand the operator’s voice and immediately deliver the required information to the ear.

Depending on the scenario, it might direct them to a colleague, or provide the answer in real time through the enterprise resource planning system. Best of all, the employee does not need to know the store’s organizational structure or their colleagues’ areas of expertise to get help. Instead, the device can connect them through requests as general as: “Contact the small-appliance expert in small appliances.”

What can retail staff do with an intelligent voice assistant? @TheatroSolution sees enterprise-wide benefits. via @insightdottech

The same principles apply to machine-generated responses. When a customer asks how many blenders are left, for example, the employee can simply state the product number, ask for its availability, and the device will interrogate the central computer system in real time.

Making Retail Communication Seamless

The beauty of this invisible assistant is that it’s always available and leverages scientific discoveries that are revolutionizing how we live, work, and interact. As an industry leader in the Intel^® Internet of Things (IoT) Solutions Alliance, Theatro allows users to leverage IoT and artificial intelligence within the retail sector and beyond. Given the platform’s flexible infrastructure, it can be introduced into any setting, and operate efficiently and transparently for staff and customers alike (Video 1).

Video 1. The Theatro Intelligent Assistant is a retail communications solution that connects retail workers and enterprise systems through intuitive voice commands. (Source: Theatro)

Highly synergistic, deployment of this retail communication solution is simple, fast, and harmonizes with existing systems. Customers get the sense that they’re speaking to an expert operator who knows all of the store’s products by heart and each staff member’s area of expertise. The new hire feels capable of satisfying the customer’s requests without looking like a rookie, and adds value to the entire organization.

More than a technological innovation, Theatro accelerates business outcomes. Take a look at the facts below for a high-level overview of the numbers:

• Drive productivity – Conversional interfaces are 3X more productive than visual. Employees saved 12 percent time, with improved communications and reduced 83 percent of ear chatter.
• Elevate employees – 91 percent of employees agree that Theatro helps them serve customers better, and 53 percent strongly agree.
• Improves service – Employee response time improved 77 percent. Faster response, including at the cash register, leads to less abandonment and happier customers.
• Increase sales – Happy employees and improved service lead to sales. Theatro drove a 7 percent lift in loyalty registration for a leading home goods retailer and an incremental gain of $87mm annually.

Despite its wide applicability, Theatro is easy to adopt, and brings the power of voice to each retail store team member’s fingertips. Thanks to its seamless integration, it enables frictionless internal management—no matter how complex the corporate information system. What’s more, Theatro can manage an institution’s entire top-down communications with simplicity and efficiency.

Blending ancient Greek wisdom with modern technology, this imperceptible device knows how to use the power of the word to do divine things.

 

To learn more about the power of voice, listen to our podcast Keeping Retail Workers Safe & Connected.