2020 has made social distancing a new and crucial behaviour that all individuals must adopt in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19. As a result, commercial and public sector building managers are looking for ways to control occupancy on site.
Knowing how many people are on your premises has never been more critical. Not only are occupancy metrics essential data for understanding how your building is being utilised, but they will play a significant role in how you protect the health and safety of visitors and employees.
Covid-19 has meant higher education campuses have had their on-site facilities closed to students for the last 5 months. However, with the new school year commencing, institutions need to make sure the steps that enable a safe opening are in place.
After months of employees working from home where possible, organisations across a number of industries and sectors are having to plan for people returning to the office. This reopening strategy will need to consist of making social distancing guidelines easy to follow, especially in high-traffic areas, as well as put in place measures to increase hygiene to prevent the spread of germs.
Maintaining occupancy limits for social distancing in a commercial setting is a crucial benefit that people counting solutions are providing in the current climate. However, the adoption of this measure not only serves as a crisis plan for a future pandemic or epidemic, but also provides a range of benefits that your business can take advantage of in the long term.
Franchises have proved to be amongst the most successful business models within the restaurant, supermarket, and salon industries. They provide investors with tried and tested methods to become profitable by offering the support and reassurance that comes with being affiliated with an established brand.
Measuring occupancy has quickly become the go to method for supermarkets, stores and buildings to meet social distancing requirements and ensure that both customers and employees are kept as safe as possible. But this data has value beyond keeping people safe, how do you maximise this?
Social distancing is all about keeping people apart from each other to prevent the spread of COVID-19. To achieve this, many Governments around the world have implemented social distancing policies that meant non-essential businesses had to close their doors. Many businesses swapped offices for home and remote working, but for essential businesses and shops, this was not possible. They had to remain open as they provide a vital a service, but they also had to find a way to ensure that everyone within their buildings has the space they require to keep safe.
Nearly two years ago, we published a blog about how occupancy data is the missing retail metric. We discussed how retailers were missing out on an opportunity to not only get a better understanding of how customers used their stores, but also how they could optimise staff scheduling to improve the customers experience and potentially reduce staffing costs.
In light of recent events and the current ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we wanted to revisit this topic as accurate occupancy data is now more important than ever – not just for retail stores, but for offices and buildings everywhere.
People or traffic counting has long been used by retailers to help understand the performance of their retail stores. Associating the traffic count with transaction records allows retailers to understand their store conversion rate – the key metric that indicates how effective a store is at converting its incoming customers into money. Retailers use this information in a number of ways – comparing store performance across the estate, understanding the impact of advertising campaigns on store performance, understanding the impact of store improvements and driving staff scheduling to ensure that the stores are adequately staffed at the busiest times.
About Irisys
As a leading supplier of people counting sensors, we have over 20 years of experience and have deployed more than 500,000 units.
Our latest product, Vector 4D, is the most advanced people counter ever with innovative features such as staff detection and dwell time monitoring.
Combined with highly accurate counting algorithms, our people counters are used in many scenarios, such as retail analytics, supermarket queue management and space utilisation applications.
Ultimately, we provide our end-users with accurate and reliable data that can transform their business.
