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By Alberto Jessurun / March 9, 2022 / Blog

How Can Video Surveillance Help with Loss Prevention?

Loss prevention strategies help retailers minimize shoplifting, employee theft, and other issues that impact profit. Video surveillance is an important part of a good strategy.

Key Takeaways

Retailers experience significant inventory losses due to theft, damage, fraud, and errors
Loss prevention is a set of practices that help businesses combat these risks
Loss prevention includes technology integrations, financial metric tracking, and monitoring methods like video surveillance
Video surveillance is part of a good strategy, and helps:
- Prevent theft
- Reduce shrinkage
- Encourage better employee behavior
- Gather behavior insights
- Lower a retailer’s liability

Retail shrinkage and related losses are major issues for retail companies. Whether from damaged or expiring goods, shoplifting, fraud, or even employee theft, loss can severely impact profit margins and make or break a business over time. According to the National Retail Federation, organized retail crime costs businesses an average of $700,000 per $1 billion in sales.

Loss prevention is a concept that helps retailers combat these issues and avoid the losses that are within their control. Here’s a guide to loss prevention for retail companies and how video surveillance fits into an effective strategy.

What loss prevention means for retail companies

Loss prevention is a way that retailers protect against profit losses. It requires a set of practices that include gathering insights about inventory loss, people, and behaviors and creating a plan to address the areas where losses are taking place. Loss prevention focuses on creating solutions to lower preventable losses before they lower the bottom line.

Loss prevention tactics aim to quell include:

Lost inventory due to theft
Lost inventory due to damage
Vendor and supplier fraud
Employee, administrative, and customer error

Shoplifting is, of course, one of the biggest issues related to retail loss. The National Association for Shoplifting Prevention reports that retailers lose over $45 million a day because of shoplifting, and shoplifters have reported that they’re only caught once in every 49 times they shoplift. This tremendous issue alongside other causes of profit loss creates significant short- and long-term problems for business owners.

For loss prevention to be effective, retailers need to clearly outline policies, expectations, and techniques they’ll use to combat the issues. Plans may include:

A communication and training strategy for employees
New inventory tracking and monitoring systems
New technology integrations to improve data gathering and decision-making
An advanced video surveillance strategy, including placement, footage monitoring, and video insight gathering
Updating accounting practices to better monitor balance sheet fluctuations

Loss prevention strategies need to be updated based on changing metrics tracked by the business; for example, if there are major changes in inventory from one month to the next. Plans should be revisited regularly so success can be monitored.

Benefits of video surveillance in loss prevention

Video surveillance is an effective method to round out a loss prevention strategy. Here are a few of the biggest benefits:

Prevent theft

Video surveillance not only shows organizations who is responsible for theft, but it also lowers thefts when customers know they’re being watched and would be caught if they stole or damaged something.

Reduce shrinkage

Retail shrinkage is inventory loss experienced by businesses because of shoplifting, employee theft, fraud, damage, or errors. Shrinkage can be tracked when a business looks at what’s on its financial reports versus actual physical inventory at a given time.

Retail shrinkage is a big issue. According to the National Retail Federation, the U.S. saw $61.7 billion in retail shrink in 2019 because of employee and consumer theft. With video surveillance, companies can monitor these issues more closely and uncover where and why inventory is going missing.

Encourage better employee behavior

Sometimes employees are the culprits of theft, errors, or damage to a retailer’s inventory. They may be consuming goods, taking cash, or sneaking items away after their shifts. One report from the National Retail Federation found that employee theft makes up 33.2% of inventory shrinkage.

A video surveillance plan will encourage them to not engage in any unauthorized activity while they’re at work, and it’s not as invasive as a strategy like spot-checking them when they’re leaving for the day.

Gather behavior insights

Video surveillance also helps companies monitor and understand human behavior. In turn, understanding people better leads to better security systems and approaches that will prevent suspicious or illegal activities from occurring, and to monitoring strategies that will catch when they do happen.

For example, video footage can show a retailer the locations within the store where theft happens most often, and the type of products that people are more likely to take. This helps the business put stronger protections in place to prevent theft in the future based on more meaningful insights.

Lower a retailer’s liability

Video surveillance also helps business owners reduce liability. They may be held responsible for anything that happens to their inventory or on their property, so having video footage of what actually happened is extremely valuable.

Find the right surveillance products from Unisol International

Video surveillance should be an integral part of loss prevention for retailers. Advanced cameras can help businesses monitor for suspicious behavior in real-time and deliver insights that help them keep improving their approach. Video surveillance can help save retailers a lot of time and money in the long run with more visibility.

Unisol International provides products and solutions to help retailers meet their video surveillance and loss prevention goals. We specialize in electronic security and video solutions, and we help our customers find the right tech products for their given needs. We offer both security cameras and video management software to help businesses stay ahead in security. Beyond retail, we also provide solutions for transportation, government, education, industrial, commercial, and many more industries.

Contact Unisol International today to learn more about how we can help.

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How Can Video Surveillance Help with Loss Prevention?

Loss prevention strategies help retailers minimize shoplifting, employee theft, and other issues that impact profit. Video surveillance is an important part of a good strategy.

What loss prevention means for retail companies

Benefits of video surveillance in loss prevention

Prevent theft

Reduce shrinkage

Encourage better employee behavior

Gather behavior insights

Lower a retailer’s liability

Find the right surveillance products from Unisol International

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