September 23, 2020.

Tools for capacity monitoring and understanding visitor behaviour, and the associated ROI, are now at the forefront of marketing and operations professionals around the globe. Whether it’s in retail environments, stadiums, exhibition venues or public spaces, the best minds in the industry are hard at work understanding new requirements for monitoring visitor behavior, capacity and crowd density to allow for the safe return to live experiences.

Simultaneously, there’s a lot of noise in the market with an increased amount of tech providers ‘pivoting’ into this specialised area, selling unproven products and technology which were developed only a couple of months ago.  To help navigate, we’ve highlighted 7 key attributes to help your decision-making process easier.

1. Flexible placement

– The COVID-19 pandemic has raised visitor behavior questions that may have never been considered in the past.  As a result, the technologies you employ need to be discreet and robust enough to exist in any type of environment. Technologies that rely on existing infrastructure or an action by consumers are limited in their accuracy to measure density or capacities in key areas. Choosing a flexible solution will improve the longevity of the technology for future use.

2. Deployment

– Relevant to flexibility is the ease at which the technology can be deployed. Does your strategic plan for your space involve a large capex investment, reliance on existing infrastructure for connectivity and bandwidth? Does it require a team of expert technicians traveling to install it or, is there an option for sensors to be self-deployed following a basic product training session? Ensuring technology is turnkey for deployment is a vital part of evaluating new technologies.

3. Reporting & Benchmarks

– Does your vendor have experience working in your sector to assist with the right questions to ask, reporting metrics, benchmarks and ultimately, making better decisions around what success looks like?  Real-time reporting dashboards with easy to understand metrics are an important part of driving analytical decision making with key stakeholders. For additional flexibility, seek out tools that have a variety of export options to make it easy to ingest data into reporting templates, databases or aggregators.

4. deeper insight

– If a deeper dive into your data is required to distill key learnings, it’s important to find a platform with a dedicated insights team that can help draw key learnings from your measurement campaigns.

5. additional reopening features

– In addition to having extensive experience in the field of crowd analytics, has your vendor recently released features such as capacity and density monitoring to provide tools for your operations team to monitor foot traffic metrics in key areas of concern?  Consider what features are critical to understanding if the new measures you have in place are effective.

6. alerts and support

– What systems are in place to monitor behaviors during up time? The ability to set capacity thresholds with a simple email and SMS alert system will keep your security teams in the loop so they can respond to incidents faster, avoid overcrowding, bottlenecks and adjust staffing where appropriate.

7. consumer privacy compliance

– Is the technology compliant with local privacy guidelines?  GDPR and CCPA have very strict guidelines on what is legal with regard to collecting, processing and storing Personally Identifiable Information (PII).  A passive and anonymous system will ensure there is no need for visitors to connect to WiFi, Bluetooth or download an event app. By passively understanding the movement of mobile devices, you will not only be sure that the information you have gathered on behavioral data will not breach any local privacy guidelines, but you will also have the largest sample size of data for analysis with minimized barriers for data collection.

If you’ve made it to this point, reading the article on Meshh’s blog page, you may not be surprised to hear that our platform covers off all of these challenges!  If it sounds like something that is of value to your team in getting visitors back to your venue, retail or publicly accessible space, please get in touch to learn more.

Photo by luka lojk on Unsplash