Global retail theft costs retailers a staggering $379 billion a year, and according to recent reports — that number is only expected to increase.

Organized retail crime (ORC), theft, and in-store violence are still on the rise. From countries in North America to the U.K., Spain, and Germany in Europe and others in Oceania, retailers nearly everywhere will have to refresh their approaches to combating shrink in one form or another.

That’s a tall task, considering retailers have traditionally had limited data on theft, leading to underreporting and unprosecuted crime. Compiling fact-based evidence packages to send to law enforcement could begin to move the needle on closing cases of shoplifting, creating stronger environments of deterrence to dissuade future thieves.

“Deterrence equals capability times will,” said Ned McCauley, retail technology business consultant. “It’s an old military term that’s appropriate for describing where loss prevention and law enforcement teams stand today.”

“In order to deter shoplifters, you need the capabilities to do so — which we now have — but nothing can happen until you pair those capabilities with the will to follow through. The good news is that the will is starting to emerge because there are now tools at retailers’ disposal to provide law enforcement with everything they need to catch shoplifters.”

Here’s a closer look at those tools, along with all the steps to take to start enhancing your evidence packages to aid law enforcement and combat shrink.

While no retailer wants to suffer a loss event, once it happens, action is needed. However, it’s in the past, and store managers know their first charge should always be in the here and now, ensuring daily operations flow smoothly to protect sales and provide a safe store environment.

From that perspective, it’s not difficult to see how reporting theft could fall by the wayside. Why disrupt daily operations to gather evidence, viewing hours of CCTV recordings or checking inventory reports and transaction logs when doing so could lead to unserved customers or longer checkout lines?

Declining to report, however, is not without costs. Failing to follow through on pursuing thieves risks labeling your stores as easy targets. While focusing on the day’s sales after a loss event may help in the moment, it can lead to a rotating door of even more losses down the line.

Not only could this recurrence of theft and fraud lead to even more financial losses, it could place your employees and customers at risk. Aside from the obvious safety implications, high-theft shopping environments have negative effects on the shopping experience, employee morale, and customer trust.

Of course, underreporting on the part of retailers is only one part of the equation. From lack of theft event data to low prioritization, cases of shoplifting are difficult for law enforcement agencies to solve even when they are reported. In order to support law enforcement with fact-based evidence packages, however, retailers will need to leverage equally enhanced tools.

What does it take to support law enforcement, catch shoplifters, and safeguard your associates and customers?

These three technologies work together to form a connected estate of solutions capable of providing enhanced evidence packages to law enforcement.

1. RFID-Tagged merchandise
   That’s Radio Frequency Identification. By tagging your products with RFID tags and labels, you’ll enable them to be read digitally by exit sensors and store software.
2. EAS
   Next, you’ll need an RFID-based Electronic Article Surveillance system (EAS) to collect and track your store’s RFID-tagged inventory.
3. Shrink Analytics
   With your inventory tagged and integrated store systems, you can now begin to analyze shrink when it occurs in your stores. It is these automated, analytic capabilities that will be key to compiling comprehensive evidence packages.

Precision is accuracy that is repeatable, and store data collected through a connected estate of RFID, EAS, and other store systems provides the kind of trusted, contextualized and unbiased data you need to reveal the “who, what, when, where, and why” behind each shrink event.

“It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the data available to retailers today,” said Jaime Kress, director of RFID sales, North America at Sensormatic Solutions. “In many cases, there’s just too much raw data to extract meaningful insights. But with the right shrink analytics, retailers get just the pure, focused, actionable data they need to glean insight with none of the noise.”

Advanced tools like the cloud-based Shrink Analyzer application from Sensormatic Solutions, collect in a single location data from item-level inventory, exits, the point of sale, and CCTV footage. With speed being a critical factor in conviction rates, you’ll want a tool that allows you to view, gather and synchronize this key data quickly and easily.

What does that look like in practice? With the Shrink Analyzer app, a store manager can now receive notifications from RFID-tagged products that have passed through the exit system without having been paid for. Without skipping a beat, they can now easily find time-stamped video evidence of the event together with all stolen product details presented in a ready-to-send package for law enforcement.

While sustainable, long-term deterrence to shoplifting will be built by increasing the reporting and conviction rates of retail crime, shrink analytics can help you shore up your own in-store operations as well.

Item-level exception-based reporting at the exits can help your loss prevention team gain greater clarity into the finite details behind lost merchandise. By understanding the “who, what, when, and where” behind each lost product, you’ll be able to identify the root causes of shrink at your stores. Is it external, administrative, supplier-based, or something else that previously wasn’t even on your radar?

“The precision analytics available in the Shrink Analyzer app provide insight into the external sources of theft like never before,” said Eric York, business analyst at Sensormatic Solutions. “The ability to predict and budget shrink has been difficult for many years, but with the accurate exit-read data available through shrink analytics, retailers can receive data in a detailed scenario that can be transformative to how loss prevention teams combat shrink.”

Even better, shrink analytics can help you measure the loss prevention tactics you deploy to combat these newly revealed root causes of shrink. The same automated speed and accuracy that revealed vulnerabilities will be able to measure the effectiveness of your mitigation efforts so you and your team can respond to ORC trends and identify optimal deterrence strategies faster.

To stem the rising tide of retail theft, retailers will need to adopt a more proactive and tech-savvy approach to combating shrink.

Enhanced evidence packages, powered by the connected estate of solutions like RFID, EAS, and shrink analytics, will be key to supporting law enforcement in the effort to catch and deter potential thieves.

Through the power of the Shrink Analyzer app, retailers can transform their stores’ data into actionable loss prevention insights. With this clear view into the “who, what, when, where, and why” behind every loss event, retailers can address more effectively the root causes of shrink to protect their products, profits, and, most importantly, people.

Contact the experts at Sensormatic Solution to discover all the ways shrink analytics can transform your loss prevention strategy.