EE has introduced Connected Retail, a service intended to leverage mobile technology to improve the in-store experience for customers.

The offering is composed of various parts, including deployment of store wi-fi and tablets for staff. But perhaps most interesting is the real-time analytics element, which tracks the locations of customers based on their mobile connectivity.

This can be used to produce heat maps for anticipating checkout queues before they form, to send customised offers, and to analyse behaviour – including when customers entered the store and how they spent shopping – after the fact to help improve traffic flow in-store.

EE believes this will help British retailers recoup some of the £1.04bn they stand to lose each year due to long queues – a figure based on research conducted on the telcos behalf last month by Vision Critical, which found that 73 per cent of shoppers will abandon purchases if they have to wait longer than five minutes.