The Retail Council of Canada (RCC) hosted its annual Decline Prevention Forum Tuesday, April 12, as a result of a digital format. The Discussion board explored the most current approaches and retail strategies to better secure folks, property, and assets.
“Our decline avoidance community below at RCC is a really restricted-knit team, so it is especially vital to see you all arrive with each other now, especially to be capable to share finest techniques, discover from each and every other, and improve our practices through the retail market,” mentioned RCC President and CEO Diane Brisebois in her opening remarks.
However the Forum was virtual, attendees could privately movie chat with other people as a result of the convention website, and there have been committed breaks throughout the day for networking.
On the lookout at the Evolution of Decline Avoidance
The first session of the Forum, “This is The place Reduction Prevention Evolves,” featured RCC Executive Advisor for Reduction Avoidance and Risk Management Rui Rodrigues and Aritzia Vice President of Decline Avoidance Chris Strongman. They discussed transferring from loss prevention to an enterprise hazard management model, and how the evolution of retail commerce has created new stress points and risks that retail leaders want to mitigate, like the rising precedence of cybersecurity.
“Even with the extraordinary growth in our e-commerce, two-thirds of our profits is nonetheless realized in our brick-and-mortar functions, so we however require a pretty robust LP staff,” Strongman mentioned even though conveying Aritzia’s transition to an organization threat management design. “We’ve experienced to glimpse for talent with a substantially much more various skillset than the current team we experienced, but our current roster has also been incredibly thrilled about the new scope we’re using on, and they have been continuing their very own training.”
Mitigating the Innovative Deception of Expert Fraudsters
Next, Canada Article Protection Fusion Centre Director Rita Estwick and Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre Performing Officer in Cost Man-Paul Larocque discussed “Mitigating the Artistic Deception of Experienced Fraudsters in Retail.”
Estwick and Larocque touched on what you want to view for with impending return fraud, cryptocurrency pink flags, how suppliers can mitigate gift card fraud, and what stores can do collectively to address these problems and give means and actionable strategies for reward card fraud mitigation.
“We normally forget about that when we may perhaps have a reduction ensuing from some kind of fraud, two reviews could be tied to one more 5 or eight and it gets to be substantially broader, and you highlight the critical position we perform as the reduction prevention team,” Estwick mentioned.
The Impact of Changing In-store Encounters
Director of Loss Prevention for Sephora Canada Calandra Guiry, National Director of Asset Security and Overall health and Security for Staples Canada Paul Trickett, and RCC Senior Retail Advisor Michael LeBlanc then took the digital phase to explore “The Impression of Altering In-store Experiences.”
This session seemed at how suppliers are responding to in-shop innovations these kinds of as cell and self-checkouts, and altering health and fitness and security measures.
“We nevertheless do pre-screening in advance of men and women enter the making . . . we make positive if a client is far more at ease with personnel sporting a mask for the duration of their company, that transpires,” Guiry described. “We’re earning confident absolutely everyone is feeling safe coming into our shops for the duration of this time.”
“It’s been a journey,” Trickett reported. “We had been on a journey with our groups and consumers correct from the get-go, and we had to pivot rather speedily. We experienced some merchants that remained open up pretty substantially through the complete pandemic with minimized hours, but at some point we ended up mandated to close merchants. We discovered early on that customers, simply because of what we offered and a great deal of corporations pivoting to doing the job remote, they had been searching for us to established up their in-household place of work, so we had to pivot fairly quickly to provide our consumers all throughout Canada.”
Other highlights of the Forum provided a RCC Reduction Prevention Undertaking Drive update a session on functioning smarter with LP tech and advancing collaboration on arranged retail criminal offense in Canada.