How a major beauty retailer uses Retail Crime Intelligence to power 75% of its reimagined SOC centered on store team safety

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, the beauty brand observed a shift in retail crime. Repeat people were causing outsized harm and loss in their stores. The median event value among repeat POIs at their stores reached 13X the median US retail event value for repeat POIs.

Four years ago, their Director of Loss Prevention Intelligence and his senior manager asked themselves a hard question: “how can we best support our associates?” Knowing security intel is only valuable when accuracy and speed build trust across the organization, the pair began designing a new, associate-centric SOC.

Before they could begin the build, the loss prevention (LP) team needed to demonstrate how a security operations model built for associate safety could address the violent escalation of ORC. The biggest challenge: Legacy processes were often reactive, leaving a gap between incident documentation and crime prevention, shared their LP leader:

The integration of Auror has allowed the retailer to turn "information, accuracy, and speed" into the primary currency for building organizational trust. 

According to the LP Director, the speed of Auror is a primary driver of ROI. Case processing times have dropped to just 15 minutes, allowing analysts to handle a higher volume of intelligence with fewer people:

“If we had anybody but Auror, with the simplification for incident entry on your event portal, it would take us a lot longer to do it. And every minute inside of a SOC can be quantified down to a P&L.”

In addition to the in value generated through Auror’s Connect the Dots module and the Investigations module, these efficiencies created through the SOC provide a separate, measurable boost to the profit and loss statement (P&L) by freeing store associates to focus on guest conversion rather than tedious administrative reporting. Success is tracked not just through crime reduction, but through their internal "HMD" (How Is My Driving?) survey, which measures the SOC’s cultural and safety impact on the associates it supports.

While the 15-minute case processing time provides a clear financial win, the retailer measures its most significant impact through the lens of its people. The three years with Auror has yielded 50K dot connections at a rate of 1.5K repeat offenders connected per month, leading to a 20% decrease in crime for the beauty retailer.

As their LP Director notes “The most invaluable ROI of all, in my opinion, is helping an associate navigate through a very challenging situation.” This human-centric approach, he emphasized, defines how the business justifies its security investments.