We’ve talked a lot at RSR about the growing gap between the online shopper experience and the in-store shopper experience – mainly, a warning that the online experience is starting to eclipse the store one, especially when you compare the amount of information that a shopper has at their fingertips online vs. at the shelf. However, there is one gap that has existed for a long time, that everyone knows about, and that various retailers have made a run at over time. That gap is in-store shopper insights.

Retailers have near-perfect visibility into customer behavior online – how they shop, what items they looked at in detail, the search terms they used to find those items, whether it ended up in the cart and then ultimately whether the shopper bought it. And if the customer buys, then that visibility is supplemented with customer data – who they are and where they live. This kind of visibility simply does not exist – for every shopper and every shopping session – in the store. The store has long been something of a black box. You can open the lid every once in awhile – follow-alongs, shopper observations, shopper intercepts. You can even peek in through the cracks occasionally – through the anecdotal stories of employees, through voice of the customer surveys, even through virtual shopping sessions and focus groups that don’t live right in the real store environment.

But all of these methods for divining shopping behavior insights in the store have limitations – either they’re too research-oriented (too far from the actual shopping behavior in the actual store), or they’re just too expensive to do in-depth or regularly, or they’re so invasive that you risk a sort of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle of shopping, where the act of observation changes the behavior of the observed.

Family Dollar saw an opportunity to disrupt this whole cycle. They just recently announced that they have implemented ShopperGauge, an in-store shopper behavior monitoring system. It is implemented at 20 Family Dollar stores, and involves non-intrusive cameras along with advanced analytics for deriving some near-real-time insights about shopper behavior in stores. Don Hamblen, SVP of Customer Marketing at Family Dollar and the project sponsor says that customers behave the same in the ShopperGauge stores as in any store – the company advises customers that there are video cameras, but customers are already pretty comfortable with those cameras in a security context.

What is exciting is the data and subsequent insights. The stores haven’t been up and running long enough to deliver big-picture insights, but the company has already used ShopperGauge tests to gain insights that can be applied to Thanksgiving and upcoming holiday promotions. For Mr. Hamblen, one of the most exciting parts about the program is the continuous nature of the analytics. “Up until now, we did targeted research or observations, or relied on store anecdotes, but now we can research continuously. Everything from adjacency to signage effectiveness – you can literally sit at your desk and have analytics delivered to you, reinforced by selected video clips.”

There’s benefit that can be taken to Family Dollar’s suppliers as well – Mr. Hamblen reports that some suppliers are very intrigued by the opportunity that ShopperGauge presents them. “We’re identifying problems to solve, hypotheses to test,” Hamblen said. “Our supplier partners understand the value of shopper marketing and they’re excited to be able to get down to the four-foot section [of the store] to test and validate hypotheses.”

With the traffic in the ShopperGauge stores, Hamblen says that Family Dollar can cover a lot of research ground in 8-week tests that give a pretty comprehensive sample size. One big future opportunity for the program is in new store openings. The company is currently testing a new store design. So far, most of the shopper research about the design has been done in the traditional way, but Hamblen is looking forward to applying the detailed level of insight that ShopperGauge can provide to take it to the next level.

Family Dollar doesn’t sell products online – their site is mostly dedicated to driving traffic to stores or providing online visibility into in-store deals. It’s interesting to me that it’s not a highly cross-channel retailer who has made the first real break into cracking open in-store shopper insights – you’d think a cross-channel retailer would have an even better understanding of the value of in-store shopper insights given what they can already learn about online shoppers. But a crack has been made. Is this the dawn of a new age of shopper insights? I don’t know that I’d go that far quite yet. But it does seem like the wind has shifted, just a bit.