Retail shrinkage is an ongoing battle for many business owners, but having a few strategies in place can help minimize your risks. If you already have an electrical article surveillance (EAS) system, you want to make sure you’re putting it to use correctly. Moreover, if you still haven’t invested in an EAS system, these tips might motivate you to make the switch to a more reliable loss prevention solution.

3 Steps for Improving Your EAS System Process

Knowing how to use your EAS system correctly will help ensure you’re optimizing all of its benefits. It doesn’t make sense to invest in a piece of equipment that you don’t quite know how to operate, right? This advice can clear things up for you and your team!

1. Devote time for team training

Both new hires and tenured team members can benefit from the occasional EAS system training, so the first consideration is to build EAS education into your regular on-boarding process. Then you can start setting time aside before or after your team members’ shifts to give them a recap.

Your EAS system is a key part of your overall loss prevention strategy, yet all too often the alarms get completely ignored. Breaking that habit is crucial, but teaching those necessary steps need to be handled with care. In some ways, it’s really no different than your standard customer service training. That’s because we never want to assume the worst when an EAS system alarm goes off. Handling these situations with professionalism will help protect your company’s image and prevent any escalated emotions.

Managers should walk their team members through the process of actually approaching the customer to help identify what went wrong. After all, no one wants to get home with an EAS tag left on their new jacket. There’s also a chance that another hidden loss prevention device was tucked inside an item in their shopping bag. You’ll want your team members to find it and deactivate it so your customer doesn’t have an alarm go off again in the next store they visit.

To do so, team members can gently ask the shopper to open their bag and move items around to confirm them against the receipt. Then they can begin to move through whatever company policy you have in place to either deactivate the tags or call on a manager to help. If you need ideas on how to proceed, this article has some great insight!

 2. Check your EAS system’s settings

Another good practice to adopt is to run a quick quality control check on your EAS system at the start of your day. If your unit isn’t even working when you wave an EAS tag around the alarm zone, then you’ll know you need to do some recalibration.

What’s more, if your alarm is going off even when the tag seems to be a safe distance away, you may want to reset its sensitivity level. Whenever shoppers are browsing a display next to the EAS system, you don’t want the alarm to go off just because they walked by it a couple of yards away. Working with the professional who installed your unit should be able to get you squared away.

3. Upgrade with a video surveillance

You can also optimize your loss prevention efforts by installing surveillance cameras around your store entrance/exit. Having video evidence of a questionable interaction with your EAS alarm can be a great tool for law enforcement if you ever do need to file a report. Your team members may not be able to recall the specific details of someone who left the scene, so having backup surveillance can be a huge benefit and deterrent for other would-be shoplifters down the road.

If you need to get your existing EAS system checked out or you want to explore you options with loss prevention equipment upgrades, our technicians at Enhanced Telecommunications are here to help. As your one-stop-shop, we can work with you for both your EAS equipment as well as your surveillance cameras. We have clients throughout the state of Idaho and into western Oregon. Give us a call at (208) 947-3900 to learn more!