How many
customers came in?
Did they stay?
How long? Where?
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USBanker
News: Technology:
"The All-Seeing Eye"
(USBanker
April 1998, Page 18)
For more information, read about Customer
Activity AnalysisTM
For all the time that bank
security cameras spend waiting for a robber to show up,
they could be capturing valuable information on the rest
of the clientele. How many customers came in?
Did they stay? How long? Where?
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Wells Fargo
National Bank is the first of three Top-10 banks expected
to have in place by the end of this quarter a new imaging
technology that can automatically discern the answer to
these questions from the security camera's film. It
even looks as though the Customer Activity AnalysisTM (CAA) system,
developed by NCR Corp.,
could make it known whether the customers visiting the
branch, ATM, kiosk, or whatever one wishes to observe,
are young or old, male or female. That's the
leading edge of this technology, which is essentially
unknown to domestic banks, and relatively new to their
foreign peers.
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More than a
dozen banks use NCR's CAATM, but none yet are in the United
States. "Wells Fargo is going to be the first
bank in the U.S. to deploy this technology in meaningful
volumes," said John Ming, manager of NCR's "image understanding" unit in
Atlanta. He could not name the two other banks
about to start testing CAATM.
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The only
domestic bank that has already used the technology is
Columbus, OH-based Huntington Bancshares Inc. As
part of Huntington's much-publicized experimentation with
videoconferencing, it used CAA-enabled cameras to monitor
activity at unstaffed branches in 1995. When the
videoconferencing trial ended, Huntington discontinued
use of CAATM.
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Randy Lee, a
Wells Fargo vice president, said the bank is most
interested in using CAATM to ensure that branch staff are not
underutilized and to guide the installation of bank
facilities
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"Until now, there hasn't been
an effective way of measuring customers' waiting
time"
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Last year the
San Francisco bank introduced an offer to give $5 to any
branch customer who has to wait more than five minutes to
be served. Asked if that was a factor in Wells'
decision to use CAATM, Lee said it was a minor one.
"Until now, there hasn't been an effective way of
measuring customers' waiting time." he says.
"There has been no way other than watching the line
and timing it." However, he adds, "We're
not trying to save $5. Our goal is to use people
more effectively."
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Wells will be
able to feed CAA's findings into staff scheduling
software that it uses. A system from Global
Management Technologies Corp. in Norcross, GA, is in use
at 2,000 Wells' branches. NCR and GMT began to
collaborate on their complementary technologies last
year.
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The
prevailing automated method of gauging the traffic at a
banking location is to analyze the number of transactions
conducted there. Though useful, transaction
analysis is limited, says NCR's Ming. By assuming
an average number of transactions per customer, it only
estimates the number of visitors. Also,
time-stamps on transactions typically underestimate the
time spent-- just counting when the teller's entry was
made, for example, and not counting the paper-shuffling
prelude. Worse, most banks don't have systems
sophisticated enough to retrieve time-stamps. And,
if a customer doesn't execute a transaction because she
walks out in frustration, the bank will never know about
it.
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Lee expected,
at presstime, to have three test branches operational by
late March, building to about 10 branches for the
evaluation period. Although NCR's Ming anticipates
that "a reasonable percentage" of Wells'
branches will use CAATM, Lee says it's too early to comment on the
ultimate scope of deployment, adding, "Obviously, we
think the technology works, or we wouldn't be trying
it."
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The imaging
application has passed the test overseas. Following
from the fact that NCR's financial services' marketing
effort is based in the United Kingdom, most bank clients
for CAATM are in the UK. Among them is Abbey
National Bank, which, after a five-branch test, is
strongly considering a 90-branch implementation-- the
largest to date. The first bank user of CAATM was
National Westminster Bank, which is testing the system's
latest available feature: monitoring the sequence
of the customer's banking behavior.
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CAATM
starts at $10,000 for a basic branch with two entrances,
ranging to $100,000 per branch where a dozen or more
observation points are used. Ming says the bank's
existing security cameras can be used about half the
time. At others, there are either technical or
logistical obstacles requiring that video cameras be
bought.
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NCR's
original goal was to develop a means of automatically
identifying and counting merchandise that is not barcoded
(individual nails, for example). This proved to be
not commercially viable. Instead NCR began, in
1994, to count customers for retailers. When
engaged by one deploying multi-media kiosks, NCR saw the
parallel with ATMs, and the bright horizon of banking
applications dawned.
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