C-Town Increased Customer Throughput

C-Town Supermarket in Hartford, CT recently upgraded their front end system to the STCR SMS solution. Their previous system was aging and they were concerned about reliability and wanted to find ways to improve throughput at the register.

Jeffery Perez indicated that the biggest changes they experienced from the start were the processing of payments at the register and the improved scan rate with the new scanner scales.  The process is quicker and allows them to move customers through the lines much faster during their busy times.  Additionally, they are also enjoying the ease of use of the register, which has reduced training time for their new cashiers.

Green Receipts

Several years ago the buzz was to go green with green receipts; unfortunately, it did not take off as expected and fizzled.  Today, there are so many smart phones and tablets that green receipts are
making another comeback and have a much brighter future.  With new software upgrades your system should be able to handle a green receipt - which would be to not print the customers receipt on paper but instead email them their receipt.  Other than the obvious paper savings there are many other reasons to pursue this.  You can stay in better contact with your customers and obtain their email addresses to send the receipts along with coupons and other advertising.  Just the energy and pollution saved by not printing could be tremendous.

Be prepared for Earth day, April 22, 2013 and visit http://www.epa.gov/earthday/tips.htm.  Contact your STCR sales representative for more information and learn how you can upgrade your system to join the Green Receipts movement.

The Key to the Retail Customer Experience

Every retailer says that they want to provide a great customer experience.  Some focus on pricing while others tailor to specific demographics.  Regardless of a retailer’s target audience when trying to
create a great customer experience, the store managers are the primary people who hold the key to the success of a retailer’s effort.  

Why store managers?  Well, common sense may lead one to think that the store’s associates are the ones who interact with the customers and have the greatest impact on customer experience.  While that is true, the question is how does a retail store ensure that their associates are performing at the highest level to ensure great customer experience?

 

Generally, the desired basic behaviors of the store associates are a friendly greeting and to assist customers in finding products.  With training, most of the store associates are able to provide helpful services.  However, to consistently deliver and learn from experiences, store associates need someone to provide feedback and guidance; that is why the store manager is the key.  Store managers or department managers, are managers and coaches of all things behavioral.  They should set targets, define what is good, catch people doing the right things, and provide feedback.  They are the primary vehicle for delivering intrinsic and external motivators.  Store managers are accountable for store culture, climate, experience and results.

 

If you want to change the customer experience in retail stores, the key to sustainable change is working through the store managers.

 

Use Exception Reporting in the Fight Against Shrink

Leveraging your POS system's exception reporting to run a tight ship is just one of the valuable tools that are rarely fully developed by store operations.  The benefits are many and should be explored

and customized to your business.  It's an ongoing effort to analyze as well as retool practices and processes to fight shrink by quickly identifying impropriety and product pricing issues as well as fine tune performance metrics and training.

The purpose is for monitoring, analysis, reporting, and decision-making.  Personalizing the various data capture settings to your environment provides management with timely, accurate, relevant, and most importantly actionable information to audit and control the POS operations.  It allows for management to standardize and evaluate performance expectations.  If requirements are not being met a report can be reviewed with the employee to decide on appropriate action to re-train, re-assign, or terminate as needed.  They can also be used to identify top performers and goal achievements to promote quality and productivity.  The important point is that it provides a consistent fact based method for performance appraisal.  These techniques can help address employee based shrink, revealing impropriety via theft or sweet-hearting, or simple unreported pricing issues. 

Using these tools to shrink the shrink and grow a well-trained performance oriented team will promote business goals and drive the bottom line in the right direction.  STCR provides POS solutions and services to assist with these critical efforts.  Are you getting the results you need?  Take a look at what features you could be using to incorporate these best practices into your business operations.  If you’re not sure where to begin, call your STCR Sales Representative, they would be happy to assist you.