Data and Deterrents: A Holistic Approach to Retail’s Loss Prevention Problem

Over the past few years, the importance of bringing loss prevention into the digital age has become increasingly crucial. The British Retail Consortium’s (BRC) 2023 Crime Survey found that the total financial cost of retail crime to UK businesses in 2022 was £1.04 billion, with an average of 867 incidents reported every day. Despite ongoing calls from retail leaders and Home Affairs Committee members — and significant investments (£722 million) in combatting the issue — crime, violence and abuse in retail locations remain significant pain points for business owners and customers.

There's little confidence that the issue of violence and abuse on sales floors will wane in the coming months unless retailers take action and utilize new tools to increase safety. The BRC’s survey found that violence and abuse against staff is the most important issue on retailers’ minds, and customer theft followed close behind. In short, many retail leaders are now struggling with an age-old dilemma: Do I double-down on what I have or explore something new? Like many things in life, the best way forward might mean doing a bit of both.

That’s where intelligence-led loss prevention — which allows retailers to collect, prioritize and use data from connected sensors to enhance their efforts — comes in.

The Benefits of a Blended Approach

Traditional loss prevention methods, like door alarms, hard tags, locked displays and receipt checks, can create barriers between customers and products. Deploying physical deterrents without data to guide their use can impede progress for retailers working to streamline and tailor customer journeys. That’s something many retailers can’t afford in today’s experience-focused market, where precision and personalization reigns supreme.

At the same time, relying on digital options alone can prove difficult, as delivering satisfying experiences is as much about comfort and expectation fulfillment as it is about keeping up with technology. Instead, taking an intelligence-led approach to loss prevention — one that uses insights to build strategy and embraces the efficacy of legacy hardware where needed — can help retailers reduce friction, improve experiences, and build better process all while mitigating losses.

The reality is that loss prevention isn’t a one-size-fits-all endeavor. What works for one retailer (or even store location) may not work for another, and that’s what makes getting it right so difficult and important. It’s for this reason that a modern, tailored approach to loss prevention starts with contextualized data. It helps retailers understand how to best leverage all the tools at their disposal to support larger business objectives while adequately addressing losses.

The Advantages of Analytics

Data from connected suites forms the basis for an intelligence-led approach to loss prevention. Many retailers have already made initial investments in tools that support better omnichannel experiences. These pursuits can form the foundation of next-generation loss prevention programs. All retailers need to do is recontextualize existing data streams with an eye toward loss prevention.

Retailers may already be using artificial intelligence-enabled video analytics to track shopper behavior or demographics, but new advancements in computer vision technology can put an extra set of “eyes” on the floor to highlight suspicious behavior and alert staff to at-risk areas in real time. When used in conjunction with other similar tools, intelligent camera capabilities can also identify video clips that correspond to known loss events to illustrate not only when losses are happening but also thieves’ tactics and opportunities to improve responses.

Additionally, retailers have been using radio-frequency identification (RFID) sensors to gather inventory information for some time now, but they can also use these solutions to gain more meaningful insights into theft events. Placing RFID readers at store doors can show exactly what items leave a store when, which helps highlight the items most in need of more stringent protections. Or, more importantly, what items need to be replenished to the store or to the sales floor so that that they're available for sale. Having this knowledge can guide retailers to more tailored uses of physical deterrents to mitigate lost sales due to excessive barriers.

The above are just two examples of the ways modern technology already used within stores can lend a hand when developing digital-first shrink visibility strategies. Put simply, when used to track the right metrics, these tools enable retailers to cross-reference loss events with other activity in-store to better assess impact. These tools can also help retailers differentiate between items stolen in bulk events and those taken by run-of-the-mill shoplifters to guide more informed decisions about how, where and when to use physical deterrents in stores.

Success in today’s market hinges on understanding the above and using a broad range of available solutions to both deter and detect theft. Retailers that adopt an intelligence-led approach to loss prevention are embracing that fact by letting intelligent tools do the hard work of finding their businesses’ quirks for them. Once they have that information, they can get to the next task: designing and deploying solutions that support their customers, their employees, and their businesses.

Craig Szklany is the vice president and product general manager, loss prevention and liability at Sensormatic Solutions, a global leader in retail systems including RFID, EAS, anti-theft tags and labels, detachers, inventory management and retail traffic solutions.