How to Present Theft Reports to Your Clients

This guide outlines best practices for sharing theft reports with Clients in a professional, collaborative way. The goal is to maintain a positive partnership focused on improvement and shared accountability rather than blame.

We recognize these conversations can be sensitive, but the steps below will help you communicate confidently and constructively to support mutual success.

1. Before Sending Theft Reports

Double-check the footage to confirm:

• The theft is genuine (despite Panoptyc’s extensive QA, false-positives can occur).
• The offender’s intent was to steal, not confusion or frustration at the kiosk.
• If case reports are shared, all clips in a grouped report feature the same person.

*If Panoptyc does make a mistake, we are more than happy to make the necessary corrections – you can contact support@panoptyc.com to let us know.

2. Communicating with Clients

Use incident sharing as an opportunity to partner with your clients, making the workspace safer, reduce theft-related costs for both parties (if they’re stealing from the market, they’re stealing from their workplace), and protect their company culture.

Tone and Approach

• Keep conversations friendly and collaborative — avoid sounding accusatory.
• Share the incidents and reach out as soon as possible and as often as necessary. 
• Start with a warm greeting (“How’s your day going?”) to build rapport.
• When sharing incidents, describe only what’s visible in the footage — avoid adding personal interpretations or guessing about intent. Tell your Client that you’d like to discuss the report together, rather than jumping to telling them what they should do. 
• It’s useful to focus first on repeat offenders to not overwhelm the Client with many individual incidents – Clients can easily experience decision paralysis.
• Offer to assist with determining restitution and discuss realistic next steps together:
  • Should the offender receive a warning, a bill, suspension, termination, etc.?
  • Whatever is agreed upon should be followed through to reinforce accountability.
• Thank the client for partnering with you and working to resolve the latest incidents — appreciation encourages ongoing cooperation.

Tip: Reserve in-depth meetings for repeat or high-value theft cases.

Talk track dos

• Hi, how’s your day going? / How was your weekend? / Hope you had a restful weekend 
• We have a few theft reports that we’d like to share with you and discuss how we can work together to enforce against these. 
• We know it’s not easy, but in our experience, we’ve found focusing on the high theft repeat-offenders first has the most impact on changing behavior across the entire staff. And these individuals who are engaging in theft are likely doing the same at work.
• For these incidents, what would be the best steps to enforce against them and start shifting the behavior at the market?
• Thank you so much for your help on this. We know it’s not easy, but action taken against theft will be better for everyone in the long-term. 

Talk track don’ts

• We need to talk about this / We’ve got to do something about these thefts (jumping straight into the issue using demanding language and no icebreaker can make your Client immediately defensive)
• We need you to look at these reports / Why haven’t you looked at the theft reports (again, demanding and accusatory language will most likely lead to a bad outcome)
• You should focus on these high repeat offenders first, it’ll set the tone for the rest of your employees (avoid telling people what to do and instead phrase it as what you’ve seen work and how it could work in this situation)
• You’ll need to take care of this on your end — that’s your responsibility / You really need to start cracking down on your staff
• Let’s get something done here, please – we need to keep this relationship possible for both of us (enforcing against employees is not always easy, and expressing that understanding can go a long way to align with your Client(s))

3. Following Up

• If a “resolved” repeat offender appears in new footage, check in with the client to confirm whether action was taken and what next steps are planned. If such an individual gets caught again, they were likely either not dealt with by the Client, or current consequences are not strong enough to deter their behavior. 
• No need to follow up on every single incident if your Client already acknowledged the report or agreed on how they will enforce the incident(s).
• To stay organized, you can use the Case Tracking Portal’s “Resolved” button to mark Cases that your Client agreed to enforce against. This will limit the chance of duplicate sharing and keep things organized in the dashboard.

Following these steps will increase cooperation between you and your Client, which is key to building a positive relationship and ultimately reducing shrink. If you are still unsure about how to present theft reports or are hitting roadblocks with your Clients, do not hesitate to reach out to the Success team at success@panoptyc.com – we’re happy to help!