Monitoring & Managing Social Distancing and Capacity

There are many sources for data appropriate to streaming processing and advanced analytics. Let’s dive into a specialized topic – Customer Location Intelligence – and look closer at monitoring social distancing and capacity management which rely on sensor-driven real-time customer location data. This use case can be quite relevant and transferable to other types of data and circumstances. Plus, you can see how bringing different data sets into the mix with AI is very powerful.

Workers and Customers Expect a Safe Experience

As we begin re-opening food, drug, and DIY stores and consumers are going to even more places, assuring proper social distancing in public remains essential. The moment people return to your facility, they must be able to visit safely and get a clear signal that your brand is concerned about their well-being. It would be best to assure your customer that you’re doing the best to implement the CDC and other guidelines on social distancing. It is not easy, and for many workers, this can cause undue stress and concern. The moment customers return to your location, and they must be able to work safely, shop, dine and experience in-person service and get a clear signal and reassurance that the brand is concerned about their well-being.

Retail stores and other locations where people gather on-premises are considering a range of different measures to promote customer and employee safety. What is the best way to do so besides guestimation and inaccurate manual counting? How do you demonstrate to local agencies and the public that you are serious about safety and reducing the spread of COVID-19? How can you provide “proof” of actual customer counts and locations in real-time and retrospectively? Customer location intelligence to manage social distance provides many benefits, including: 

• Enabling safe shopping in stores, at restaurants, working out at a gym, going to church, hospital or clinic, or even enjoying a theme-park or trip aboard a cruise ship 
• Complying with government, industry and internal standards for safety and social distancing 
• Mitigating confusion for store management and staff because standards may vary from state-to-state and store-to-store 
• Mandating external and internal compliance that may require monitoring and reporting on conformance to standards 
• Reducing risk by providing actual data on how your policies and practices are being implemented and maintained
• Addressing locations of concern where social distancing policy and rules are being violated 

As you can see, using streaming data and basic rules or algorithms, you can use customer location technology to help prevent COVID spread and provide your customers and employees reassurance that your brand is doing everything it can to keep them safe.  

Use Real-time Capacity Management

Using proprietary real-time customer location technology provides customer insights for operational and marketing deployment that can be used to address a key concern about capacity management, real-time, and across multiple locations. This technology tracks specific location triangulation from sensors more accurately and better than using cameras and counting devices.