There are plenty of reasons why installing a CCTV system can improve your business, but can it improve your business financially as well? At Central Southern Security we understand there to be at least three reasons why CCTV is a worthwhile investment for your small business.

1. Prevent employee theft

A survey of nearly 1500 people revealed that 78% of them admitted to stealing something from their place of work, with the range of goods swiped from offices including laptops, televisions and petty cash. On average, people admitted to stealing goods worth £930 over their career, with some topping £5000. Make sure you’re not losing money (or goods) by installing CCTV, so you can keep an eye on your staff.

2. CCTV is more cost effective

What is more financially effective for your business? A CCTV System or a security guard? With so many different types of CCTV systems on the market which can be tailored to your business and budget, it is unlikely that hiring a security guard will be more cost effective for your business in the long run. You should also remember, in larger shops, it can be tough for a guard to access every point, where as a CCTV system will enable one person to supervise the whole building from an area.

3. Deter external thieves

In 2012-2013, customer theft cost the UK retail industry over £2.2 billion pounds. One of the most effective solutions for preventing shoplifting is simply acknowledging the presence of the thief. CCTV will mean that anyone visiting your premises is very aware that they're being watched, and not only that, that they're also being recorded. This can be a very effective deterrent and could save your money thousands of pounds.

Having your business broken into can cause more than just distress and heartbreak, it can potentially put you out of business. But there are plenty more reasons why all businesses should think about installing CCTV beyond the increased security.

When the boss is away, it’s time to play

While we all like to think of our employees as trustworthy and hardworking individuals, it isn’t always the case. The reality is, that usually when employees feel like they aren’t being watched, productivity may decrease and ultimately cost your business money.

Installing CCTV cameras with remote viewing will allow you to watch your store or business even when you’re not there. Just knowing that you have the ability to watch your staff will help productivity and will give you the ability to look at the way your team is working, and make any changes to improve productivity and teamwork.

70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated

Satisfied customers will buy from you over and over again, but unfortunately, 91% of unhappy customers won’t complain, they just won’t come back. When it costs 6-7 times more to obtain a new customer than retain a current one, as a business owner, you want to stop that from happening.

But how can CCTV help? Most businesses, (but especially retail businesses) can benefit from installing and watching their CCTV recordings regularly to see:

• How your customers are being treated by your employees
• What aisles have more traffic than others (you may need to rearrange your store to put the high profit items in the areas with the most traffic)
• Find out which items get attention but don’t sell - do these need a price adjustment?

As you get used to using your system in this way, you’ll start to notice more areas you can improve on.

Health & Safety

More and more businesses are using CCTV to help address compliance with health and safety regulations.

It is up to employers to ensure the health and safety of all people in their workplace. Having camera footage on hand to verify incidents or check an employee was following company policy and safety procedures can be a valuable resource, to protect the company against a claim or to use in future training.

CCTV systems can often be difficult to understand, with so many options available. Central Southern Security breaks down the three main elements of a CCTV system so you can identify what system is best for your business.

CCTV Systems can be broken down into three main elements.

1. ‘Take pictures’ with a video camera
2. Send the pictures to their destinations
3. Manage the pictures that arrive there

1. Take pictures with a video camera

The first element a CCTV system needs is the ability to take pictures with a video camera. There are many types of CCTV cameras which can be categorised by the types of images they are able to capture, the amount of frames they can take per minute, the type of connection to the monitor or video recording device, whether they are able to move position, and special functions they can provide.

1. Indoor cameras. Used for indoor security systems.
2. Outdoor cameras. Used for outdoor places and are mostly installed on entry or exit points with limited lighting.
3. IR day/night cameras. Used for high alert security areas. (Mostly by the military, in parking lots and high security zones).
4. Dome cameras. Installed inside a dark dome and are designed in such a way that they go unnoticed by visitors. They are used in public places like bus terminals, railway stations and other areas where there are often huge gatherings of people.
5. Bullet cameras. Placed inside bullet shaped housing, and are often used in residential places as well as commercial places. They are small in size and waterproof.
6. Vandal proof cameras. Used in outdoor security. These cameras are covered with solid material and a “break proof glass” which doesn’t affect the quality of the video.  It is difficult to destroy these cameras and this makes them perfect for high security.
7. Hidden cameras. Compact in size and are used for secret monitoring. These are generally installed at public places like shopping malls, departmental stores, theatres and clubs etc.
8. Pan –tilt- zoom cameras. These offer the ability to view and zoom in all directions. They can even be set to automatically rotate to different fields of vision.
9. High-Definition cameras. Ultra high-definition cameras are often relegated to niche markets, such as casinos. These give the operators the ability to zoom in with extreme clarity.

2. Send the pictures to their destinations:

There are two main types of connections for CCTV cameras: a fixed cable or a wireless connection.

Fixed Cable Connection (wired system)

A fixed cable connection means that the camera is physically connected to the monitor or recording device via a cable. Coaxial cables that are similar to normal home TV cables are usually used. As the distance increases, signal quality decreases. For distances longer than 100 or 200 feet, higher quality coaxial cables will need to be used.

Wireless Connection (wireless systems)

Most wireless CCTV cameras use the 2.4 Gigahertz frequencies to transmit their video images to a monitor or DVR (digital video recorder). Usually, frequencies can be slightly changed to have more than one group of cameras in a specific space. Wireless CCTV cameras that use this frequency can easily transmit through most walls and obstacles. However, each individual location will have its own operating limits. Expect most wireless CCTV cameras to send data to a range of about 200 feet. However, many will more likely work well when transmitting less than 150 feet. A clear line of sight transmission will always work best.

3. Manage the pictures

There are two main ways to record and manage video images that CCTV cameras capture. They are VCR tape recorders and digital video recorders.

VCR Tape Recorder

A tape recorder such as a security-time lapse VCR can record CCTV camera images in either black and white or colour, from anything between 2 to 960 hours. The determining factor is how many frames per second you intend to record and how many cameras are hooked up to the VCR for recording.

Digital Video Recorders

There are two types of Digital Video Recorders. They are either stand alone devices or hard drives that are connected to a computer system. DVRs work similar to VCRs, but the images they capture from the CCTV camera is digital. The amount of digital images captured on a DVR is determined by a few factors including the frames per second recorded, the amount of cameras hooked up to the DVR device, the resolution that the DVR saves the images at, and the video compression used.

The idea of monitoring employees may seem uncomfortable to some, but there are some great business advantages to using CCTV including security, health and safety, training and assessing productivity .

However, there are some small risks that you must be aware of.

Trust and Confidence

The first risk is the trust between you and your employees. Employers should not act in a way which is likely to destroy or damage the relationship of mutual trust and confidence between themselves and employees. If employees feel that this is the case, they can resign and claim constructive unfair dismissal. 

TIP: To try and minimise this from happening, make sure you tell your employees before you install CCTV. Discuss with them:

• that you are introducing CCTV
• the reasons why
• the circumstances in which monitoring will take place
• the nature of the monitoring
• how information obtained will be used
• how their rights will be protected

Employees should be given the opportunity to discuss this and make their views known. After this has happened, the employer’s procedures and practices should be included in a written CCTV policy document that is explained to employees in their induction and ongoing training, and is readily available to them.

Data Protection Act 1988

The next thing to consider is the Data Protection Act 1988 (DPA).  These laws and principles regulate how an employer can collect and process ‘personal data’ about employees, which includes video footage of them recorded with CCTV cameras.

The laws give employees the right to be told what kind of data is being held on them and the reasons that data is being collected and processed. They can access this by serving a ‘subject access request’ on you which can be timely to deal with.

TIP: Make it clear what levels of privacy an employee can and cannot expect. The use of CCTV in break areas, toilets and changing rooms would be hard to justify under any circumstances. In an area like a public entrance, however, where expectations of privacy are low, CCTV is more easily justified. An example of a situation which might fall somewhere in the middle would be where CCTV monitors the entrance to a department but a number of workstations fall within the camera's view, meaning certain individuals' everyday activity is monitored. In this case, it may be that the employer should look into the possibility of adjusting the camera angle to avoid disproportionate monitoring.

Human Rights Act 1988

Employers in the public sector should be particularly aware of the right to privacy which their employees have under the HRA as it applies directly to them. However it is still important for employers in the private sector to consider this right and ensure their monitoring is not intrusive.

TIP: Data captured must be relevant, not excessive, securely stored and not kept for longer than is necessary. This will again help to ensure that your employees’ rights are protected and that the evidence gathered can later be relied on if necessary. Some employers may need to provide details to the ICO of how they handle personal data and the ICO can be contacted directly for further advice regarding this.

Want more information?

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) Employment Practices Code contains further detailed guidance and recommendations, including:

• Carrying out an impact assessment to determine the pros and cons of CCTV monitoring compared to alternative means of achieving the same objectives, including the administration and record-keeping required – particularly if employees make subject access requests. This should include an assessment of where the cameras will actually be – for example, cameras monitoring the shop floor or open-plan offices are less likely to breach privacy rights than CCTV in a restroom, and cameras that constantly monitor one or a few employees in an area are more likely to be considered intrusive than those that monitor all employees in that area roughly equally

• Training those responsible for CCTV monitoring to ensure legal compliance – particularly in relation to confidentiality of employee.

In the CCTV world, there are two types of systems; digital and analogue. In the past, analogue CCTV systems were the only option. The system simply recorded activity for future access. However as this system does not broadcast actual live information, it is not practical for monitoring stores or businesses from a remote location. The picture quality is low and sometimes unusable for legal purposes. Analogue systems rely on human intervention, as you will have to change tapes regularly.

Although analogue served a purpose, digital CCTV is revolutionising the way CCTV is used. We look at ten reasons why digital CCTV systems are better for your business.

1. Digital CCTV stores as many recordings, from as many cameras as you like. You will only be limited by the size of the data storage on your computer or server.

2. The quality of your images you record using digital CCTV will be better and will also be cheaper to copy to CDs/DVDs to pass around if needed.

3. Digital CCTV recorders record up to 100 images per second, and can record simultaneously from each camera.

4. With digital CCTV, it’s easy to sort through recorded data for a particular event and you can connect to the digital CCTV system over the internet to check on recordings.

5. Digital CCTV is unique in that it will only record images when movement is detected. This ultimately means that you will only have CCTV footage of activity, instead of hours of empty images.

    

6. Analogue CCTV means you will need to change the tape every day, and have the space to store the videos.

7. When you copy or record over the tapes, the picture quality degrades, so you’ll need to replace them, using hundreds of tapes.

8. Analogue systems record from each camera in turn.

9. If you use analogue CCTV, you will need to manually search through recordings to find the incident you want, and as it records everything, that could be hours of tape!

10. Analogue cameras require complicated cabling that can be quite expensive and also challenging to install.

There are plenty of different uses for CCTV security systems within small and large businesses ranging from the obvious, to the less obvious. Central Southern Security looks at ten different uses for CCTV within your business.

1. Deterring thieves

CCTV systems are a great deterrent to potential thieves. Once they realise that your business is protected by a CCTV system they will invariably choose to go somewhere else.

2. Creating a safer working environment

CCTV helps to ensure staff stick to health and safety policies and can be invaluable in staff training and can also help if you need to look back at a specific breach of policy.

3. Checking records

CCTV is convenient for keeping records, as it can be used as a system to allow you to prove to customers and check yourself that, for example, their shipments were sent out.

4. Making convictions easier

The prosecution rates for businesses using CCTV is much higher than those without CCTV. If your business is unfortunate enough to be a victim of crime at least there will be a strong chance of detection and conviction.

5. Settling disputes easily and quickly

In some cases, when a customer has a complaint about your service, you may have some doubts about who is in the wrong. For instance, customers claiming that they have been short-changed or purposefully sold bad goods. In addition, they may try to claim that an accident which occurred on your premises happened because of a breach in health and safety regulations. In these cases, sometimes just mentioning that you have a record on CCTV may make the con artists back down.

6. Remote monitoring

With remote monitoring, you can keep an eye on your business when you aren’t there. Some CCTV systems can be viewed and controlled remotely over the internet (via an iPhone, laptop etc).

7. Reducing the fear of crime

Knowing you and your business is well protected gives a feeling of security that should not be underestimated. Just ask anyone who has been burgled how they felt immediately after it occurred.

8. Assessing and improving productivity

Not sure why your team isn’t performing, or why productivity has slowed down? CCTV can be used to watch and assess the way your team works, making it easy to make positive changes. 

9. Preventing employee theft

CCTV can also help prevent employee theft. Often it’s employees themselves who are stealing. According to statistics gathered by focus groups, most usually the reason for this is not need but rather opportunity. So, if your staff know they are being watched that can make it far less likely.

10. Staff protection

In lots of jobs, employees are vulnerable to either physical or verbal attacks from the public. Often, in stressful situations, customers may lash out at a company representative. If the employee knows they are being watched by CCTV camera, he or she will try to minimize these cases and stay calmly deal. Moreover, it is able to protect the employees against false allegations that might be common in some areas of business.