Tango Eye bringing AI at Lenskart

In October 2020, Lenskart invested in Tango Eye — a Chennai-based AI video analytics startup founded and led by Surender Gounder. Since then, the two companies have built a synergistic partnership together.

While visiting a store in a mall or a shopping avenue, have you ever wondered why the security guard at the entrance, on seeing you approach, hurriedly scribbles in her/his register or clicks away at something that resembles a desk-bell? Well, all s/he is trying to do is register your presence at the store, just as s/he is directed to. Traditionally, for the longest time, this is how Customer Footfall used to be captured at stores, in the most basic, manual way. The accuracy of the data, however, remained questionable as it was entirely dependent on the availability, rigor and diligence of this ‘manned’ endeavor. That the result of this rudimentary exercise is somewhat flawed would be an understatement as it is more often than not subject to human error, negligence or sheer lack of motivation or tardiness, at times. After all, there is no way the results can be verified or validated.

This complexity compounds with multi-level departmental stores that are manned by a security guard at each store level .The guard ‘counts’ you at each store level as you step in or near the entrance, thus cloning you in their records. Moreover, you might just be a head count on the register with no second thought towards you as a shopper. To summarize, the headcount data is just a broad stroke picture for the day.

At Lenskart, however, we believe in bringing an ‘AI Lens’ into this all-important activity of capturing customer footfalls as we strive to deliver on our values of customer centricity and customer obsession.

To achieve this, we have invested in and brought on board Tango Eye, a leading provider for computer vision technology, offering end-to-end video analytics solutions. Their AI and ML technology converts video data into actionable insights for improved efficiency, increased sales and security at retail store fronts with minimal manual intervention and zero room for error. The best part is that it does not require investment in any hardware or software to function as it simply plugs into the store DVR/NVR at the store location and analyzes the data on various camera streams.

Let’s answer the elephant-in-the-room for Video Analytics Technology: Is the customer’s identity being compromised?

While we, at Lenskart, take utmost care in safeguarding our customers’ identity in all our operations, we also ensure that we comply with prevalent Customer Privacy Laws and Regulations in all the geographies that we operate in. We do this by crunching all store images into a sequence of numbers and then delete the pictures irreversibly. The data processing is unlike online shopping where shoppers feeds in all the details about themselves and the system stores them for future reference and recommendations.

Customer Privacy is at the heart of this AI solution

How do we stand to gain from using this technology?

This AI-driven technology helps make the journey from ‘Data to Decision’ shorter and interesting as we discover our customers, their experience at stores with our employees, merchandise and our brand.

The technology is not restricted to mere quantitative inputs on Customer Footfall at stores but also aides in qualitative analysis on a multitude of factors. These broadly include store operations intelligence, compliance with Covid-19 safety measures, aggregate customer demographics and footfall profile, customer experience as well as engagement with our stores.

Scaling AI with Tango Eye

Tango Eye has been deployed at 500+ Lenskart stores. It has helped us capture customer footfalls with a 95%+ accuracy (meaning data reliability thrown in good measure) and also provided a deeper view into the footfall in terms of group, individual and window shopper counts. For instance, at stores with a high percentage of window shoppers, Store Managers can now strategize to align employee interactions with customers for greater engagement efficacy and help transition their ‘browsing’ behavior to ‘purchase intent’.

Store Operations Intelligence in terms of store opening and closing hours offers valuable actionable insights into the average time stores are open for business — which has a direct bearing on store revenue.

During the pandemic, the technology has specifically helped Lenskart track the compliance of Covid-19 safety regulations with respect to social distancing, masking up, temperature checks, constant sanitization of eye glasses and hand sanitizing by employees and customers alike — ensuring the safest store experience across all Lenskart establishments.

Merchandise availability at stores has also become easier to track, followed by alerts to concerned teams on anomalies in placement or in inventory in terms of scanty or empty shelves. An additional benefit we expect shortly would be in the area of loss prevention where suspicious activity is detected and malpractices such as theft and intrusion are alerted in time.

Another important metric in the data is the average time spent by customers at our stores along with the differentiation on the hotspots and the dead zones within a store. This is indicative of the customer interaction with our brand and unearths an opportunity for us to have deeper and more meaningful engagements with them.

This customer footfall data can also help identify stores with dissatisfactory customer traffic. Tailor-made marketing campaigns for these specific stores can help drive footfall and potentially improve revenue for the stores.

In a nutshell
In our experience, actionable insights from Tango Eye’s data provides clear advantages to us:

• In-store customer engagement for higher customer retention, upselling opportunities, enhanced customer experience and increased loyalty
• Optimized store operational hours for revenue maximization
• Employee scheduling for better productivity and work-life balance
• Merchandise alignment for improved sell-through, profitability and customer satisfaction
• Shopper insights for targeted marketing

Lenskart’s approach to investing in technologies like Tango Eye is to build a competitive edge together and for each other. Lenskart provides the startup an opportunity to expand on its product features through a variety of retail use cases at 750+ stores. At the same time, we continue to leverage their technology to solve our business challenges in knowing our customers better and more intimately.