Theft and fraud is still costing Europe's retailers in excess of £18 billion per annum according to the Centre for Retail Research's most recent Global Theft Barometer Survey and employee and customer theft accounts for around 70% of all shrinkage.
While many retailers are investing heavily in CCTV technology linked to business intelligence and loss prevention applications to help spot irregularities and trace them back to specific transactions and staff members, a growing number of retailers say queue management can play a role in reducing shrinkage.
Help retailers
According to Q-Matic Group, the world's leading providers of queue management solutions and inventor of Customer Flow Management, deploying a queue management solution can help retailers reduce shrinkage in a number of ways.
The introduction of a single linear queue and electronic call forward system are having an impact on shrinkage and according to Q-Matic, the thinking behind this is that the combination of a single queue and a call forward system randomises the process by which consumers are directed to checkouts.
This reduces the potential for sweethearting either in the form of staff and customer collusion or off-duty staff members working in partnership with staff members on duty.
Difficult to collude
As Alistair Agnew, Chief Executive of Q-Matic UK points out, "Every transaction takes a different length of time and the call forward system directs a queuing customer to the next available position. If the customer is looking to collude with a particular person on a checkout, it is extremely difficult for them to go to a specific terminal where their fellow collaborator is working if the queue management system is directing them to the opposite end of the checkout line. More importantly, anybody offering to give up their place to a fellow queuer to allow them to wait until their preferred checkout becomes available would quickly attract suspicion."
Staff theft in all forms accounts for more than one third of all shrinkage with women's wear and designer wear being the most commonly targeted items in non food environments. So called sweethearting, where a customer picks up a number of high value items, but the checkout member only scans through low value items is a major issue.
400 stores
"By randomising the way in which a customer is directed to a checkout, this type of fraud becomes considerably more difficult to perpetrate," said Alistair Agnew. "We have one major retailer that has deployed single queue call forward systems across 400 stores and they have reported significant reductions in shrinkage since our system went live. As this is the only change in process they have introduced, they have been able to attribute the reduction to our system."
The secondary benefit of a single queue with call forward is that positioning of CCTV cameras becomes more straightforward. You can put one to monitor the head of the queue to ensure people are not passing up their place to collaborate with a particular checkout.
Because a single queue eliminates the melee that often occurs around a checkout, cameras covering the checkouts have clearer fields of view and therefore a retailer is more likely to be able to spot any suspicious activity.
The third area where the deployment of a queue management system can help reduce shrinkage is by helping drive down process errors. The creation of an orderly queuing system reduces crowding at checkouts which in turn reduces stress levels among checkout staff.
As Alistair Agnew points out, "Staff under pressure are more likely to make mistakes and mistakes cost money. By introducing order and process, you reduce the pressure on staff and in turn we have seen a commensurate reduction in errors in retailers using our systems.
No holy grail
Despite these successes, Agnew and his team remain pragmatic about the scale of the challenge faced by retailers fighting to reduce shrinkage, "We are not for one moment suggesting that the introduction of queue management represents the holy grail in the battle against shrinkage. We recognise that our solution forms one component of a much broader strategic mix of solutions encompassing loss prevention and business intelligence software as well as the deployment of appropriate CCTV technology. However, it is clear that the introduction of queue management can play a key role in helping reduce certain types of fraud and with criminal activity still costing retailers vast sums of money, any technique that helps cut losses has got to be good news."
For more information, please contact
pia.knudsen@q-matic.co.uk