Customer walks in, cash register rings. One seller of luxury goods decided to find out what happens in the interim. In this example, an international clothing brand with $1.1 billion in annual sales hopes to improve its relationship with retail customers. As part of this goal, the company wants to understand how well shoppers are being served, what displays catch their eyes, and whether the path they take through a store matches the original architectural vision. The company chose to purchase a managed service that uses video cameras to track individuals within an establishment. The retailer first set up a six-month pilot in three of its 17 corporate-owned stores. In each 10,000-square-foot location, a third-party integrator installed cameras and connected them to desktop PCs. The video data was sent over a dedicated high-speed link to the service provider, which analyzed the data and served it back to the retailer over the Web. At the end of the pilot, the company outfitted the remaining 14 stores with the same systems.

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