Carillon City shopping centre, managed by Western Australian-based property group Hawaiian, is a shopping centre located in Perth, Australia. It’s a large centre with 11,760sq metres of floorspace catering to more than 130 specialty stores in Perth’s CBD. Tenants include 45 fashion stores ranging from national brands to emerging designer boutiques, nearly 20 jewellery stores and more than 25 food retailers.
Carillon City sought to gain a greater understanding of customer traffic in order to share this information with its tenants so they could grasp the impact of their marketing campaigns. The main concern was measuring footfall (people counting), to understand exact number of visitors overall, as well as breakdown of customers per hour, day and more.
Carillon City Solution
To meet the needs of Carillon City, Agent Vi’s Vi-System retail solution was deployed by Agent Vi’s channel partner, AusScott Guardian Systems, through distributor BGW Technologies. Agent Vi’s software is integrated with the Ocularis video management system from OnSSI, allowing for analysis of the video feeds from the 80+ cameras deployed at the site.
Vi-System is Agent Vi’s real-time video analytics software, which transforms standard surveillance networks into intelligent and effective detection and alert systems. By performing real-time analysis of the video stream, Vi-System identifies and generates alerts for user-defined events relating to people, vehicles and objects. Used for applications such as security, safety and business intelligence, Vi-System enables automatic detections, alerts and responses to events, as they emerge.
Meanwhile, Vi-Search is Agent Vi’s innovative video search and analysis software, which enables rapid and effective retrieval and presentation of specific video segments, events and data from vast amounts of recorded video. It’s an extremely powerful tool.
Vi-Search allows true leveraging of stored video by enabling instantaneous forensic searches, analysis of motion patterns and extraction of statistical data for applications such as security, post-event analysis and business intelligence.
A range of Agent Vi capabilities are employed by Carillon City including people counting to detect and tally the number of people entering and exiting the site (bi-directional) and provide accurate footfall statistics illustrating traffic at various entrances/exits across different time periods.
There’s also heat map and site map to offer visualization of motion data and traffic levels (hot zones) within the area covered by a specific camera or across the entire site covered by multiple cameras, to ascertain the areas with greatest frequency and activity.
A target path is used to identify dominant customer traffic paths and an advanced statistical tool is employed to receive comprehensive statistics reports about customer activity. There’s also forensic investigation to undertake rapid investigations of security incidents, including lost/missing children.
Carillon City initially looked at Agent Vi’s analytics to obtain footfall (people counting) data. However, once exposed to the full range of retail capabilities, Carillon City realized that they could gain invaluable insights into customer behavior throughout the mall. Accordingly, a wide range of analytics features were introduced, helping management to better understand customer activity, measure the impact of marketing campaigns and provide important feedback for tenants (retailers).
As a first step, Agent Vi’s retail solution was deployed to gather data about the number of people passing through all entrances/exits. Management view this data to understand overall customer traffic levels, and to ensure that visitor numbers stay within the maximum occupancy figure set by the site’s insurers.
Furthermore, the footfall data provides management with accurate visitor numbers to pass on to tenants, helping to support ROI decisions of existing/potential tenants. Using Agent Vi’s advanced reporting tool, the management analyzes visitor traffic, breaking down such data per entrance/exit, per time period (such as every quarter hour or every hour), per day (weekday vs weekend traffic) and more.
The target path feature provides management with a visual indication of visitors’ movement paths, allowing easy identification of the most dominant traffic routes. Such information is of strategic value to the marketing department, assisting with decisions regarding optimal locations for marketing promotions and campaigns.
Agent Vi’s heat map capability allows Carillon City to provide tenants with figures of how many people dwell outside their stores, indicating the impact of window displays and marketing campaigns. Moreover, the frequency and activity of visitors, as illustrated by the heat map, allows management to grasp the mall’s busiest areas as well as the quieter areas not being optimized.
Carillon City also discovered that Agent Vi’s retail solution serves important security needs, and utilizes the forensic investigation tool to locate lost/missing children in the mall. By narrowing the search query using parameters such as size (‘small’ for child) and colour of clothing, the security team has quickly located lost children.
“The ability to accurately see where and what people are doing throughout the mall gives management a greater capacity to cater for customer and tenant needs,” says Brad Ward, operations manager at Carillon City shopping centre.
“In addition to serving our objective of receiving footfall figures demonstrating customer traffic, Agent Vi’s retail analytics delivers a significant amount of data on customer behavior, which has proven to be of great importance to our marketing and operations departments.
“Furthermore, the investigation capabilities of the software were an added value for us, allowing our security officers to manage security and safety incidents in real-time.”
Ariel Frischoff, VP sales at EMEA & APAC is also impressed with the solution.
“By making use of the data gathered by Agent Vi’s solution, Carillon City shopping centre has increased the return on investment on their surveillance system, transforming it from a standard security system into an invaluable business intelligence and investigation tool,” he says.
