LPRC - Episode 19 – Detecting ORC, Crime Reporting Software & Empathy Maps ft. Tom Batterbury of Auror

Episode Date: February 12, 2019

The post Episode 19 – Detecting ORC, Crime Reporting Software & Empathy Maps ft. Tom Batterbury of Auror appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we aim to explore the science of crime and the practical application of the science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. Co-host Dr. Reid Hayes of the Loss Prevention Research Council and Tom Meehan of ControlTech discuss a wide range of topics with industry experts, thought leaders, solution providers, and many more. On today's episode, Tom Battleberry, co-founder of Aura, joins us to discuss detecting and fighting ORC, crime reporting softwares, and empathy more. On today's episode, Tom Batterbury, co-founder of Aura, joins us to discuss detecting and fighting ORC, crime reporting softwares, and empathy maps. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Take advantage of the advanced video capabilities offered by Bosch to help reduce your shrink risk. Integrate video recordings with point-of-sale data for visual verification of transactions and exception reporting. Use video analytics for immediate notification of important AP-related events, and leverage

analytics metadata for fast forensic searches for evidence and to improve merchandising and operations. Learn more about extending your video system beyond simple surveillance in zones 1 through 4 of LPRC's zones of influence by visiting Bosch online at boschsecurity.com. Welcome everybody out there to another episode of LPRC's Crime Science Podcast. Today I'm here with my co-host, Tom Meehan of Control Tech, and we've got a special guest today. We've got Tom from AARR, and we're going to make sure that we're corrected not only our crazy American accents, but just the proper pronunciation of this really, really interesting organization

that we've just recently started working with. You know, so Tom, I'm going to go over to you real quickly and ask you, you know, how did you get to know LPRC and what were your first impressions? And then Tom, I'd like to, the other Tom, Tom, me and I'd like to go back over to you. I know you've got a couple of things you'd like to ask. Cool, thanks, Reid. And thanks for having me on the podcast. So in terms of how we first came aware of LPRC

was when we were exhibiting at the NRF Protect Conference. And a lot of the retailers and the asset protection leaders that we were talking to keep bringing up the LPRC as a great organization to partner with and where retailers and solution partners actually collaborate and sort of work together in a less sales sort of focused environment. So I guess that sounded like a good opportunity and very much aligned with our approach of how we run our company. So it was something that we wanted to get involved in and so far so good and really enjoying it and looking forward to seeing what opportunities evolve from

it. All right, fantastic. And I think all of us like to hear about referrals. It just gives us a level of comfort and particularly when it comes from noted practitioners out there in the field and those that are looking for something interesting and new, but most importantly, helpful. And for our listeners, of course, you might note a slightly different accent. We're normally dealing with me as, I guess, a southerner, if you will, and Tom, who's the other guys. But in this case, Tom is from beautiful New Zealand. And I've had an opportunity to visit New Zealand and Australia. And I know that Aura works in both of those areas. And I actually can sort of tell the difference

in accents a little bit. But that's the noted difference there. Tom Meehan, let me go over to you. And what do you got for today's guest, Tom? Thanks, Reid. Tom, thanks for joining. You have an amazing name, so it makes it easy. I'll never forget it. You know, I'm really intrigued. I will say that I heard a lot about what you did. And I think the more and more I read about it, people are confused. So we have a pretty broad listener base. It consists of retail, federal, local law enforcement, and then asset protection professionals. One, just for everybody, again, make sure everybody knows how to pronounce it, because I think we all have our American accent, and we think that the way we speak is the right way to speak.

And then additionally, if you could just tell us a little bit about what you actually do today. Great. Thanks, Tom. So, yeah, we pronounce the company Aura, but we won't be too offended if any of the listeners get that wrong. As a company, we're building a retail crime intelligence platform with the sole purpose of helping retailers report, solve, and prevent crime across their stores. And I say building because for us, software and platforms, they're never finished. It's always about working with our customers and evolving the capabilities to actually help them more effectively reduce crime and ultimately loss in their stores. And I'm happy to jump into any details if you want, but that's sort of the high-level purpose of why we exist as a company.

So I guess one of my questions is, so what does your software do that is new or different? Because I think there's a lot of people that say crime intelligence or intelligence or link analysis, but not that many in the asset protection space. So if you could, what is the key differentiator than some of the other things that are out there today? Yeah, so when we looked at the asset protection sort of industry and the software that they use around reporting incidents and crimes that happen in stores, what we identified across all the customers we spoke to is that basically systems of record.

So they're built to be databases of each individual event, which is great, and that's sort of their job. But because they've been built in that sort of way, we often find that the interface for how the store teams, the associates and the asset protection specialists use to report the crimes is really, really cumbersome and clunky. And so what we see happening because of that is that a lot of the store teams, A, either aren't reporting a lot of the crimes that happen because they're too busy with other things, or B, when they do report things, they're not putting all the right information in. And obviously, if you don't get the right information in, it's hard to get the right outputs. So the first part of what we do is trying to make the reporting crime really easy. And we start with thinking about what do the store teams need to be able to do that quickly.

But the actual way that the system's built is actually around the people that are doing the crimes so the idea of the platform is to actually connect connect the dots across all the individual events and when we talk to retailers at the moment a lot of the systems that they have because their systems are record it makes it really hard for them to actually connect the dots on who the repeat criminals are their accomplices the, the ORC groups. They often don't have images and video, and because of that, it makes it really hard to solve and prevent crime. So probably much like most of the listeners, my interaction with you and your solution

is fairly new. It's in the infancy, and I'll just say that I had the opportunity to read all of your materials and then read the Medium article. And I'm more intrigued now than I probably was before because I assumed it was something different. But one thing from my past, I spent 20 years in retail asset protection. And one of the biggest challenges we had was individual data entry where we had folks who really wanted to do the right thing, but if it wasn't ATM simple, it really became challenging. So you mentioned that in just your intro. What are some of the things you're doing to make it very easy for the end user who is already probably busier than they should be, has too much work to do, and is constantly

being asked to do something different? So what are some of the things that you're doing today to make it easier for them and what are some of the results that you're seeing based on ease of entry? Yeah, that's a really good question. So I guess one of the things with software today is that as consumers in our private lives, we're using apps like Facebook, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb. They're all incredibly easy-to-use applications that have been designed with the end user in mind. None of those particular applications require any training. So, you know, you just download them and you know how to use them. The implication of that for enterprises such as retailers is that when they're trying to roll out new tools and solutions to their teams, their teams in their private lives are actually using all these apps that are super easy to use, no friction.

It's almost fun for them. And then you're trying to roll out this sort of enterprise-grade software that's incredibly clunky and cumbersome. So because of those expectations, we really think there's an opportunity to be design-led for asset protection and the software that you give to the associates within the store environment. So one of the ways that we do that and approach that as a team is to have empathy maps. And what an empathy map does is it allows you to get an understanding for a particular type of user what they're trying to achieve in their role like what they think and

what they feel and we need to find that and you start building the software for them if you keep that front of mind and it helps you sort of build build a more seamless experience for what they're trying to do and and when we look at our space in particular around reporting solving and preventing crime there's so many different user groups there's the store associates there's asset protection specialists and stores there's OIC investigators there's you know the VP of asset protection and they're all trying to use the software to actually do different things,

albeit around reporting, solving, and preventing crime. And so what we've spent a lot of time as a team doing is to build these empathy maps out for each of those user groups. And again, they're not finished. It's like as we meet and engage with new customers, we go, hey, that's kind of an interesting perspective from that type of user, and so we'll constantly try and update them. And basically it just helps design and build better software for our customers. Good stuff, Tom. And this is Reid.

I wanted to ask you, let's go back in time a little bit. Presumably it's New Zealand and somebody needed something. Somebody spotted a problem and you guys started working on it. You know, can you kind of take us back there and give us a little insight into, you know, what was going on and how was it approached and how did you launch? Yeah, cool. So the genesis of Aura five years ago was when we read an article that said shoplifting costs $2 million a day in New Zealand. And initially we didn't believe it. It just felt like a big number. And often, that's obviously the case for people when they're not asset protection professionals. They don't actually realize how much crime is going across

the retail industry. And we did a bit of research globally and saw numbers around $100 billion problem. So we're like, this is quite interesting. And we spent that weekend talking to over 100 retailers in the store environment, as well as local police to try and understand the actual problem and what they were doing about it. And we just identified so much friction between, particularly the dynamic between the retail store, their support office, and also the dynamic between the retailer and law enforcement. And we just saw opportunity to build software to make reporting, solving and preventing crime easier.

So that's how we started. And we basically approached the largest retailer in New Zealand, a grocery chain called Woolworths, and we spoke to their national loss prevention manager about, you know, this is what we've seen and started asking him a lot of questions. You know, how many crimes are happening in your stores? Who's the repeat offenders that are hitting your stores right now? What are the outcomes you're getting from the police?

And he was unable to easily answer those questions without going and getting someone to do some digging for him. And with that realization, he agreed to do a pilot. And I guess the rest from there is history. We'll just continue to evolve and work with more customers and police and build on the capability. Excellent. So let me ask you that. I mean, then you started expanding. I mean, what did that expansion look like and what was fueling that expansion? So a big part of our platform is the ability to create a data network effect for an individual retailer across their stores and then also for retailers as an industry if they choose to collaborate. and then also for retailers as an industry if they choose to collaborate. And so once we got the first customer, it made it slightly easier to get the second customer. And then if you fast forward that, we've ended up with a lot of the major retailers in New Zealand on our platform as well as the police here.

And then last year we pushed into Australia and got one of their biggest customers on board and are now doing the same thing there. And now, this year, we're looking to come into the U.S. and put boots on the ground and start working more closely with the asset protection professionals and retailers. Okay. So, I guess in your experience now, at least you're working in two countries that are presumably a little different. I know that everybody thinks their football and Formula

One and so on are a little different, but the difference between you and Australia, but also maybe the United States. I know you've done some homework here and quite a bit of that homework. What are some of the differences in the information you can collect? Who you can make it available to or share that information with. What are some differences here that you're seeing in the different countries? Yeah, that's one of the key conversations we have with our potential customers. And I suppose what we see across retailers globally and including in the UK, the conversations

we've got going there is that obviously retailers need to comply with their local privacy law and they need to get information security right. And those are kind of top-of-mind concerns that are paramount. But what we believe is that that shouldn't be the compromise of innovating and trying new ways to actually combat OIC because it's such a significant problem for the retailers in their bottom line. So when we start talking to the retailers and going, okay, well, what are your stores

doing currently? And potentially we do some store visits. You end up chatting with the stores and you'll see that on their own initiative, they've started a WhatsApp group of local stores around them and which may not be from the same retailer and that you know they're capturing and sharing information across the groups there and these are actually these are actually methods of sharing information that don't have the level of enterprise control that retailers we talk to are after.

So basically retailers and stores are already capturing and sharing information and they're actually doing it in channels and ways that have less control than is desirable. And then we just think that globally it's harder than it needs to be to report and solve and prevent crime. But that's not because of the restrictions of privacy law. It's more because of the restrictions of privacy law. It's more because of the restrictions of the systems that retailers have. Interesting. So I think one thing I wanted to take a look at is, and I'm going to have Tom talk to you about GUI and tech things, but I know, Tom, you know that we have a lot of initiatives in what we call Zone 5, and that means beyond the parking lot of the place we're trying to protect.

And we're doing a lot of work in that area. Tom Meehan mentioned at the beginning, you know, that this community, the LPRC community is, you know, 70 retail chains. It's 75 solution or technology companies like yours. But it also includes law enforcement agencies at all the different strata, you know, local, state and federal. But in particular, we're trying to, of course, tie together the retailers so they have that situational awareness and understanding even better. But communicating with law enforcement. And as you know, we're going to be moving into that Baltimore area to trial some of these things as you know, we're going to be moving into that Baltimore area

to trial some of these things as well as what we're going to be working on here in Gainesville where we can make much more quickly the adjustments that need to be made. But, Tom, if I could, what are your thoughts on what you want to accomplish, what your customers are doing in New Zealand and Australia, and how might that help us here in the U.S. really trial and learn and implement a fantastic way to communicate what is going on, who, what, when, where, why, and how, so we can be better at preventing it? Cool. Thank you.

And I'm doing my best here to not try and talk about Aura too much, but I'll try and share my perspectives on your question. So one of the interesting things is that retailers and law enforcement talk about information sharing, and they're doing it, and they want to do it better, but then also there's this layer of needing the control around it, which I sort of alluded to before. around it, which I sort of alluded to before. What we've found works in our platform is to actually, we position it as a solution for a particular retailer themselves, and they don't have to collaborate with law enforcement or police on our platform. So it's effectively their own incident management, case management platform. But we also bring on other retailers and we bring on law enforcement onto the platform, and then we enable the retailers to actually control,

hey, retailer A wants to collaborate with retailer B, and we allow them to connect up their data, and they can actually turn off and on what law enforcement agencies have access to their data as well. So that's kind of part of it around how you connect the dots and consolidate across all the different retailers. And then the other part is creating a collaboration fabric within the platform so that if retailer A and retailer B are collaborating and they both are working on a case around John Doe

that's done, you know, 10 events at each company, they can both are working on a case around John Doe that's done 10 events at each company. They can then actually work on those cases within the system, so they can do the types of things that you're familiar with using Facebook or LinkedIn, where you can go, at Reid, we're working on John Doe. He's just been active again. Do you want to team up on this? Or you could tag in the local law enforcement user,

and it's about getting everyone on the same platform to make that communication and connect those dots so you can actually build and close these OIC cases faster. But I'll go back to the first point that I made is that retailers don't have to do all that from day one, and they might not be ready to do that from day one. So it's really important that they have the control not to, but they can evolve into more sharing as they become comfortable with it.

That's good. And a quick follow-up. Again, I'm a little naive so far on the system and we're really excited to get walked through that. So you can report obviously crime attempts or events, incidents, and use them internally. And then, of course, to a certain extent, share, depending on a lot of or some limitations that might be out there. But also, is raw intelligence in this equation as well? Or did I miss that, Tom? Yeah, it is. And I guess intelligence is a broad word and has different meanings, but the actual intelligence that we give is predominantly focused on repeat offenders and ORC groups that are active hitting your stores right now.

So an example of that would be John Doe hits three stores. The stores report the events. They automatically get connected together. So it's a profile of John Doe that's just done three events. That's so much easier for an OIC investigator to go, hey, John Doe's active again, let's do something about this, rather than just be looking at three events by themselves. So it's that kind of actual intelligence to go, hey, John Doe's active again, what do you want to do about this?

And that's from an investigator level, but from a store perspective, if John Doe hits one store, we can alert the stores around that area that John Doe's targeted before with real-time alerts or where retailers are going around license plate recognition and facial recognition. It's how do you integrate all the systems together so that if one store reports a crime and then that person's detected in another store,

they get automatically alerted to go, hey, John Doe targets Dyson vacuum cleaners and he's just been detected arriving in your car park. You know, it's about bringing all the technologies together to make your people more effective in preventing the crime in the first place. Yeah, that's good because we have within-store communication, as you know, we have between-store communication within one company, a chain,

but then also between stores, of course, as we mentioned. But also the next scale, let's say within a store, is a mall or a strip center or a retail cluster area. And one area we're going to be working on is communication between those stores. And you might have, in our case in the U.S., a Dollar General. You might have a Safeway. You might have so-and-so drugstore and so forth. You might have a cluster and one or two or four of them are members and are in on this research and development. So could they communicate routinely as well as, you know, counter-analyze what's going on? And could they maybe deploy things that protect their own place,

but maybe they do something extra that helps the cluster get better and so on. So I don't know if there's anything in there, if that's making sense or how your technology might better enable some of that, but that's where we're headed with this as well as the more community scale, larger scale. Yeah, absolutely. So I guess from an enterprise retailer point of view, they might say a retailer might have have a thousand stores that's kind of their community across the country. And so one part, you need to make those a thousand

stores work together as an enterprise. But then as you've talked about, each of those individual stores is likely to be in a cluster with other retailers. So how do those individual stores from the one organization also collaborate in a safe and transparent and secure way within their individual cluster? And how do you give the enterprise retailer control over that so they feel comfortable with what's actually going on and across the detail? And that's sort of the key thing. And what we're seeing in industry is that there's just so many layers of different systems that are being used. So individual retailer will have an incident management system. They might have a case management system on top of that.

They might be doing facial recognition pilots, but none of the systems are talking to each other. Then individual stores around the U.S. might be involved in different orcas, and they're now each contributing to different systems, plus they're involved in WhatsApp groups. So there's just so many layers of things going on that if you can just make it one layer that's smart enough to know who needs to get which information and give the control of that to the customer, that's what we believe the big opportunity is. And if you can do that effectively,

that's when we'll start connecting more dots quickly and we'll actually make it harder for the OIC groups. And, Reid, I've heard you talk quite a lot about the risk-award ratio and obviously at the moment it's just way out of whack. Like the perceived returns from shoplifting and OIC against the perceived risk of actually getting apprehended and prosecuted are just way out of whack. And that's, we believe, because just the information lowers and how hard it is to connect the dots too quick, how hard it is to connect the dots, just means that it's too easy at the moment

for the criminals to get away with it. Does that make sense? It does. It does. And I appreciate that, Tom. Let me go now over to Mr. Meehan. Tom, fire away, if you will. Thanks, Reid. Thanks, Tom. I have a couple questions. And I don't want to get too technical. But I think the one thing you talked a little bit about, you touched on the ease of use. But when you're thinking about designing your platform, and really, you know, designing your platform and really, you know, the UI and what the user experience, really UX or the GUI, whichever way you want to approach the terminology. What's your philosophy behind it?

I know at first glance, just looking at it briefly, it looks very sexy. It's very visually appealing, which is great. But when that transitions into use, what is your philosophy from developing the software? Are you focused on the Apple-esque, I want it to really look great and be high-level design? Are you focusing on ease of use? Are you focusing on performance? Or are you really taking the approach of why not do everything the best in class? Yeah, I don't think all those things are mutually exclusive. We spend a lot of time trying to make the reporting crime experience really easy,

and I'll use your word, sexy. And that's because you're trying to get a huge number of store associates and asset protection specialists to actually report the crime and you want the information to come in good. But a belief or an ethos that we have at Aura is reporting that just makes life so easy for the investigators and the police to, you know, design and functionality and capability all together without actually compromising. Does that answer your question? Absolutely. And then you mentioned working in different countries. And I have in my new role, and it's not so new anymore, I've had a much greater depth of global experiences. How are you managing, not how do you, how are you managing the privacy when you have GDRP

and then you have some places where photos aren't allowed to be stored? So how are you managing that without rewriting the software every single time? I've got to assume that's challenging, And I know it's challenging for me. I can't think, and I don't deal with the level of data you do. So how do you manage that country to country? And even, you know, even in some country to country, there are completely different philosophies or interpretation of it. So what's that like for you?

Cool. Well, in New Zealand, we're lucky in the sense that our privacy law has been recognized by the EU as being EU equivalent, and we're one of the only countries to be recognized that way. And what that means is we've had to have a really high standard from day one about how we capture, manage and share information or allow our customers to do that. And one of my co-founders, Phil, is actually a former privacy lawyer. So as a company, before we wrote a line of code or built anything, we spent a lot of time talking to the Privacy Commission, seeking independent legal advice and making sure that we built in the right

controls within the platform to minimize those risks. And then typically, each time we go to a new country, we'll obviously test all our legal kind of philosophy and frameworks to how our platform does things for our customers and make sure that we get adequate sign-off before going too far through the process with the customer. Yeah, I can imagine that can be a little challenging, but based on the fact that you're starting in the EU, it's probably easier for you than folks starting in America going to the EU. Yeah, exactly. And I still go back to my point that a lot of retailers are already using in their store environments, even without, you know, sometimes management don't know.

There'll be teams using WhatsApp groups, Facebook groups, they're sharing images, they're doing photos. That's far more risky to information security for that company than having a controlled way where you can see everything that's going on who's accessing the information and the layers of control that you know software can enable yeah yeah definitely i mean uh you know i can tell you that we went where there was a time when no one would share anything and then i think that that's solely being undone and i can remember even i don't know it feels like forever ago but 10 years ago where i don't know where reed was speaking and talking about the importance of sharing appropriately you know and then the pendulum is starting to swing the other way where a lot of things to your point are getting shared and from my perspective is I've always said share appropriately

you know making sure that you're taking safeguarding but you don't want that information to be held too close to the chest because people need it to work together. So I certainly see a need and I don't see that need ever going away. I only have one more question and it's a little bit off into the left. I think you touched on it for a brief second, but when I was reading your materials and the Reddit, there was this concept of empathy maps and it was really interesting. So could you give the listeners kind of an overview of what is an empathy map, how it applies to crime intelligence, and how it applies to everything else, really?

Yeah, cool. Yeah, so obviously we didn't come up with empathy maps as a framework. It's a framework that's been designed and well used by many companies to basically better understand each of their distinct user groups and what they're trying to do. So for us, with our goal of helping retailers report, solve, and prevent crime, and trying to create seamless workflows around that. There's a huge amount of interaction between different types of users, whether it be a store associate, an OSE investigator, or a local law enforcement officer.

And so what's really important is that you spend the time in trying to understand the distinct role that each of those different user groups are trying to play and trying to do in their day-to-day job, and you actually understand how they think and feel. So, for instance, a store associate got so many things to do in the store, really, really busy. Historically, they've reported crime.

They never hear anything back from local law enforcement or support office. They start to kind of go, what's the point? So once you start to understand those sort of perspectives and feelings that your users might have, it enables you to create a better experience for them. And so with the store associate in mind, we try and, first of all, we try and make the crime reporting process really painless. So like, how do we just make it easier for them so they can do it in a couple of minutes? And then secondly, how do we create a feedback loop so that that store associate knows that the crime that they reported actually means something

and it potentially contributes to some sort of outcome that their organization or law enforcement is able to achieve? So that's just one example. But as a team, if you work through each of your user groups, it's super interesting because you can get your engineers, your product designers, your support team, and everyone sort of working around a shared understanding of who we're actually building the software for and making sure that you're building it, first of all, with them in mind.

Because if you don't build it to make their lives easier, then they're less likely to want to use it. Thanks, Tom. I appreciate it. I still think it's an interesting concept. I encourage all the listeners, and we can post it in the show notes to take a look at. You have a really good overview article of it,

and it talks to all the points that you've had. I'm going to turn it over to Reid for some closing comments. This has been a great interview, and we really appreciate all your feedback from the southern hemisphere, if you will, Tom. And, you know, the LPRC community is just that. And the way the founding 10 retailers set this organization up just 19 years ago was they wanted to make a true community to create that. And that that meant not just retailers, but it would be retailers and critical solution partners working together with a science team. And that's just where you all come in. You're bringing a lot of great new fresh ideas, but you're bringing those ideas in with a lot of experience and evidence

about how to work in more than one country, more than one jurisdiction within a country. And so there is a ton for all of us to learn. But as we've talked about, particularly in what we're calling Zone 5, the idea of coordinating with each other and our law enforcement partners, this type of platform holds huge promise for something like that. We appreciate you coming on and describing it. We look forward to working with you in more detail with it, Tom. And so with that, I'm going to go ahead and sign off today. We hope all our listeners got something out of this, and we encourage you, as always,

reach out to us here at operations at lpresearch.org with any of your questions or comments or suggestions. And for my co-host, Tom Meehan, for our producer, Kevin Tran, and Tom Batterbury, we really appreciate you from our coming on. And everybody have a great one. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more crime science episodes and valuable information at lpresearch.org. The content provided in the Crime Science Podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal, financial, or other advice. Views expressed by guests of the Crime Science Podcast are those of the authors

and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the Loss Prevention Research Council.