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NEW DELHI: Pacific Mall in West Delhi figured out through algorithms that 65% of the customers at its food-court preferred vegetarian food. That prompted the mall to add a Halidram outlet and sales at the food-court went up by Rs 50 lakh a month.
In Bengaluru, Orion Mall found that most of its customers are “trendier” young crowds who mostly purchased fashion and electronics, prompting it to ramp up those verticals.
Taking a leaf out of the ecommerce textbook, malls have started, albeit in a small way, mining customers data and using algorithms to drive sales. Prominent malls in India for years had revenue-sharing agreements with retailers and the shopping centres would receive daily or real-time sales data from brands through a common technological platform. Now such platforms are evolving to capture various other information on buying patterns and preferences of consumers to help malls drive sales and footfalls.
“We have built a platform which gives them insights into what are the areas they need to concentrate. We have an AI (artificial intelligence) platform and through data science we forecast their revenue and trends, and we tell them the buying habits of the consumers,” said AM Navail, an assistant vice president at tech firm Pathfinder. According to the company, it offers technology services to more than 100 malls and is helping dozens of them in mining consumer data to drive sales and footfalls.
Malls these days have a host of tech at their disposal to help them not only drive sales but also enhance the overall consumer experiences.
For example, high-definition CCTV cameras not only capture pictures but also generates heatmap of visitors around the mall that helps mall owners to assign facilities and manpower.
Such cameras are also used to analyses gender and age brackets of customers and the stores they are entering. “If the customers are thronging to the sports area, we can figure out with the heatmap technology and tally with the conversion rates with those retailers and realise we need more brands in that category,” said Deepak Zutshi, the centre head at New Delhi’s Select Citywalk Mall.
West Delhi’s Pacific Mall has installed a technology that can track the duration of cars parked in the parking lot. “That way we are getting average three hours of dwell time of cars that are coming into the mall,” said Abhishek Bansal, its executive director.
Rajneesh Mahajan, the CEO InOrbit Malls that operates shopping centres in several cities, said churning consumer data was in its infancy in India due to limited and non-uninform data available from retailers to mall owners.
“We are still at an initial stage and this will evolve and people will get unified platforms to get the data,” he said. “Unless everybody comes on board and data in a certain manner and the KPIs (key performance indicators) are defined, it won’t be that meaningful.”