Empowering your frontline teams with Retail Crime Intelligence

The impact of ORC (Organized Retail Crime) is far more profound on frontline store teams than any corporate financial statement. Each day, store teams are subject to violence and threatening behaviors for simply wanting to protect their customers, staff, and stores from wrongful acts. From store closures in San Francisco and empty drug store shelves in New York, to calls to protect retail workers in the UK – it’s a rising issue to address.

Yet, traditional incident and case management systems fail to consider store colleagues, their problems, and the critical contributions they make in reducing crime, loss, and harm in stores.

Let’s see how asset protection/loss prevention (AP/LP) teams are empowering their frontlines with the tools and intelligence to safely protect themselves, their colleagues, their customers, and stores.

What is stopping frontline teams from doing their best work?

AP/LP teams are tasked with reducing loss, and more broadly crime, while balancing the customer experience. But many teams don’t have the right tools and information to help reduce loss, which causes the customer experience to suffer too.

Here are three broad problems we commonly see amongst frontline teams:

Case management systems not designed to prevent loss

Many solutions focus on recording details of incidents after the fact, but do little to help teams solve and prevent crimes. This limits a retailer’s ability to properly address the cause of the problem, and ensures staff spend unnecessary time and energy on recording information that may never see the light of day again.

This creates an environment where teams don’t see the point in reporting incidents, since nothing changes regardless.

Chronic under-reporting by teams

Thanks to systems that aren’t purpose-built to prevent crime, there is severe under-reporting amongst frontline teams. Some retailers are saying they only see 1% of everything that’s actually happening.

This isn’t a surprise when you think about how traditional solutions tend to overlook who the majority of their users are, store teams. Today’s retail teams are diverse and technology-driven, and they expect the user experience to be as simple as selecting a song on Spotify, as intuitive as ordering an Uber, or as easy as searching for places to eat on Google.

When the reality of reporting incidents for many retailers is slow, outdated, and futile, it’s no wonder so many retailers suffer from a severe lack of incident reporting.

Lack of sharing and collaboration

While things are starting to shift, it’s still common to see gatekeeping of information within (and between) organizations. Information about incidents might only be available to a select few in an organization – such as corporate AP/LP teams – limiting visibility for frontline teams and leaving them completely vulnerable to potentially violent or threatening behavior on a daily basis.

People are talking to each other more and more within the industry. AP/LP professionals send each other information about persons of interest and incidents. But this sharing is taking place on platforms like WhatsApp and email, where the information can be disorganized, delayed, and vulnerable to data breaches.

Instead, an intelligence-first approach that allows the sharing of real-time information in a secure and easily accessible manner is proving to be changing the game against retail crime.

The true impact of a Retail Crime Intelligence platform

Auror empowers teams to easily and quickly report information about incidents, such as the people involved, items and amount stolen, CCTV footage, and more. This information can then be made available to other stores within the same network, as well as to other retailers and law enforcement partners.

Our data shows that adopters of a Retail Crime Intelligence approach receive on average a 300% increase in reported intelligence from stores. This is because it’s not only easy to report and share information, but frontline teams can see the impacts of their efforts.

Retail Crime Intelligence success stories:

1. A person responsible for currency fraud across some of the biggest retailers in the United States was identified thanks to exceptional reporting efforts from multiple retailers. This person was linked to 60 events on Auror’s platform, across four retailers in three different states. They are now part of an ongoing Global Investigations case.

2. Another case – this time in Australia – saw an investigation led by two of the country’s top retailers result in a successful police bust. They seized AU$180,000 worth of merchandise, identified a number of receivers, and arrested the people involved. The police warrants were made possible thanks to intel gathered on Auror’s platform, which helped to uncover a complex network of people working together to target supermarkets.

3. Finally, another win out of North America saw three people recognized by the store team of one of our retail partners, resulting in law enforcement being called. The three people were arrested and it turned out they were responsible for 70 events worth over $41,800. They were active all over the east coast of the US, with two having shown violent and threatening behavior in the past. This is a great example of how quickly collaboration can happen with the right tools and information.

Empower your frontline teams with the right tools

Retail Crime Intelligence is proven to help frontline teams embrace their critical role in safely reducing the impacts of crime. The world’s most innovative AP/LP teams recognize this, and are seeing safer and more profitable stores with happier customers and teams.

Contact us to learn more about Retail Crime Intelligence and how it can help your organization.