The specifics…Envysion was chosen as a winner of the TiE50 award receiving the award in the Internet/Social Networking category and was chosen as one of the 50 most enterprising startups of 2012. TiE50 celebrates entrepreneurship by rewarding the best companies in their field and Envysion was recognized because of the increasing demand of our managed video as a service solution.

In addition, Envysion was named a finalist in the New Product or Service of the Year category in the 2012 American Business Awards for the newest version of its Managed Video as a Service (MVaaS) application designed to further increase productivity and profit impact of video for customers. The American Business Awards are one of the nation’s premier business awards programs and Envysion was recognized for the continued product innovation in our SaaS model which enables rapid development cycles so that customers continuously realize new value from our service.

All of us at Envysion are very proud to accept these awards and we remain committed to driving exceptional results for our customers and these recognitions demonstrate the fact that our hard work is paying off.

As a product manager you are correctly expected to provide the voice-of-the-customer during internal discussion about product design and direction. When you become the user, you have the true voice the customer, being the customer – the user – instead of merely being the surrogate. Hypothetical debate is minimized. Nothing is lost in translation. You have a pure, genuine understanding of your product – where it’s strong, where it’s weak – and true insight into how to make it better.

It’s fun to get really, truly intimate with your product from time to time. It’s an exercise I would recommend to all product managers – become your user.

Further, retailers are implementing secret shopper programs to increase customer service. With a MVaaS platform retailers are able to monitor staff customer service to real life customers remotely. Marketers and merchandisers can also test different promotions, packaging and product placement with real-time visual data empowering management to make operational decisions in a timelier manager. The video can be leveraged to understand the customer demographics by relating visual data to sales.

Successful retail executives will work with store management to execute strategies that deliver immediate results from the store floor such as customer wait time. Line times can be monitored and this information can be leverage to improve the stores operations as well as scheduling to improve labor efficiencies.

By embracing real-time data and video from within the store retailers have the opportunity to create a retail organization that is poised for continued success and growth.

If a customer enters the store but cannot find an associate to help her find what she’s looking for or sees a large line because the store is understaffed, she’s likely to leave without making her intended purchase. Not to mention all of the customers who come to the store to browse, feel and try products and then buy elsewhere. If the store is properly staffed to provide consistent, engaging customer service then these potential purchases could be converted to sales in the store. If the store is under staffed and can’t provide the expected service,  both purchasing customers and browsers leave with a bad impression of the brand.

Providing consistent in store customer experience and capturing the maximum sales, requires a new staffing model based on sales opportunities. Every person who walks into the store is a sales opportunity. The traditional staffing model leaves too much room for under staffing and missed sales. I challenge HR to evolve and find better ways to staff the store.

Want to learn more? Check out Using People Counting and Conversion Rate to Increase Sales

Best-in-class restaurant establishments have put the proper controls in place by establishing effective loss prevention programs.  A key component of a successful loss prevention program is video surveillance cameras and already 90 percent of retailers monitor their staff. However, this can mean spending hours reviewing video footage and by themselves are not enough.

QSR’s such as Chipotle, Carl’s Jr.®, and Qdoba are utilizing MVaaS (managed video as a service) solutions that combine the visual data with transactional data from business systems such as point of sale (POS) greatly improving the power behind the loss prevention program. MVaaS solutions allow franchisees to monitor their business from afar, transforming reams of video footage into searchable, actionable information.

Join us to learn how restaurant operators maximize profitability with every transaction, gain detailed insight into store operations and improve loss prevention efficiency with video in the upcoming webinar sponsored by Envysion ‘Top Loss Prevention Tips for Restaurant Operators.’

Register Today: Top Loss Prevention Tips for Restaurant Operators

• Date: June 6^th
• Time: 1:00 p.m. ET

Many of the breakout sessions discussed how these emerging technologies can be leveraged including the case study presentation ‘Managing Video as a Service to Drive Loss Prevention Results and Deliver Demonstrated Profitability Improvement.’ Alecia Camps of Big Lots and our own CEO, Matt Steinfort discussed the benefits of Managed Video as a Service for the retail industry using a case study on Big Lots.  MVaaS solutions integrate video with business systems such as point of sale extending the impact of loss prevention to cover more locations and support more investigations and prosecutions. Envysion’s easy to use exception reports enables loss prevention specialists to quickly identify high risk transactions and instantly review the corresponding video, allowing LP teams to rapidly determine and document cases of theft or fraud.

Further, the meaningful visual footage can be shared across departments throughout the entire organization. The video can be integrated to merchandising tools adding a whole new dimension to understanding customer behavior and give retailers unfiltered real-time insight into operations.  Beyond loss prevention the video solution can be used to ensure consistent execution on the brand promise, identify best practices for training purpose and gain unfiltered insight into the execution of marketing programs.

We’re pleased to make the slides from the RILA presentation ‘Managing Video as a Service to Drive Loss Prevention Results and Deliver Profitability Improvement’ available. Specific examples of exception reports, transactions and videos demonstrate how Big Lots and other multi-unit retailers are using MVaaS to improve the results of loss prevention and other departments – ultimately driving store-level profitability improvements. View Slides

The online channel marketer looks at the website analytics and develops a hypothesis that changing how the shopping cart displays additional sale items will better capture the shopper’s attention and drive more up sells. The online marketer builds the new shopping cart, runs an A/B test on the new shopping cart display versus the old one for a month, compiles the data and determines that her hypothesis was correct. The new shopping cart did in fact increase basket size and should be implemented across the entire website.

The physical channel marketer responsible for the brick and mortar stores has a similar theory that the up sell items displayed at the checkout are not capturing shoppers’ attention. He too designs a new display, but that’s where things begin to break down. How does the physical channel marketer ensure the new displays are set up properly or on time or at all? How does he measure if the display is working?

At the end of the two months, both marketers report back to the CEO. The online channel marketer presents hard evidence and data that shows how her efforts have increased basket size. The physical channel marketer, unable to present any data that draws a connection between his efforts and increased basket size, has only managed to collect anecdotal stories on how his display impacted sales.

Which marketer would you rather be? I’m betting at this point you’re likely to choose the online marketer. Obviously it’s much easier to test, measure and show results in this channel. But the physical channel marketer has a significant advantage – a tangible, real life shopping experience – if he can figure out how to control, test and measure marketing efforts in the store.

Good news. Leading retailers have done just that and can test a marketing initiative in the store just as they do online. To learn how read the How to Guide: Harnessing Big Data for Competitive Advantage.

People Counting gives retailers visibility into store sales by providing the missing inputs to create a Conversion Scorecard and dissect sales into its driving factors: traffic, conversion, and average dollars spent per transaction. Having this information at your finger tips, you can assess weak stores and take steps to improve store performance by effectively focusing on the root causes of the performance problems. For example, if traffic counts are low, marketing should work to get more people through the doors; if conversion is low, store management should review staffing levels and inventory and selection, among other things, to improve conversion rates; and if the average dollar amount spent per transaction is low, store management should review tactics being employed to increase cross- and up-sales.

Envysion Analytics is a key service enabling our customers to glean holistic insights into their store operations that they were otherwise missing. With Envysion Analytics, you have yet another means through which to improve profitability with Video-driven Business Intelligence^TM.

This past week saw wireless retail POS leader iQ Metrics announce a partnership with MVaaS provider Envysion.  We will jointly provide an integrated solution to wireless retailers.  This is an exciting partnership on a number of fronts. 

The foundation of the partnership is the value that video based business intellegence delivers to the end wireless retail customer.  Specifically customers are seeing bottom line impact in sales improvements, loss prevention, and operations and asked that Envysion and iQ integrate and connect more formally.  Its great for providers to see value in partnerships but its more important that customers recognize the value.   

Also, this combination represents a cloud-to-cloud connection, meaning that the end customer can ‘say the word’ and iQ and Envysion can securely and nearly immediately integrate video into their critical business data thus accelerating ROI and further reducing IT strain for the end customer.  If you are a believer in video driven BI, we would argue that an MVaaS model is the only way to go.  Consider the need to scale to locations, to users, and integrate to multiple data systems and you quickly recognize that traditional software and hardware models require spinning up huge IT projects.  Just the opposite with MVaaS.

We welcome iQ to the MVaaS ecosystem!   Can’t wait to circle back with more great use cases and case studies.

We need to take a moment to pay homage to our customers. They believed in the value of MVaaS and Envysion delivered. Our customers understand that a managed video solution can be an engine that drives results in a way previously un-attainable.  What drives our customer base is results.

Customer’s utilizing MVaaS improve decision making and profitability by arming employees across their entire organization with the instant, unfiltered visual context of what’s actually happening. MVaaS connects easy-to-use video with critical business data, like POS, to provide actionable insights to drive profitability. Together with our customers, we’ve assessed the impact and compared the results versus locations without video or with traditional video and our customers can say with near certainty that they realize profit improvement. Video-driven business intelligence is part of their loss prevention and operational strategy and has measurable ROI. Envysions helps companies drive results.

Don’t take our word for it, hear our customers speak to the results they’ve seen utilizing MVaaS. See the results! Watch the video