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.

Need Help? Call Us!

With any technology come the challenges of the various issues it can present.  When technology is mission critical, access to quick competent support is vital.  The STCR Technical Support Team answers your calls quickly and solves most issues within moments of the initial call.

Our Technical Support Center is staffed with a highly qualified, seasoned team of Retail Systems Analysts who get continual product education.  As a Premier Business Partner with over 45 years of experience, direct access to development support teams, fully functional physical and virtual machine labs, technical knowledge bases, etc., we have all the resources necessary to provide you the high level support needed to resolve any issue you have.  In addition, we have a first rate team Technical Account Managers and implementation specialists.  This network of resources allows us to dispatch key personnel directly to your store to provide emergency on site services and custom solutions. 

We use a state of the art call tracking system to monitor all our calls.  It supports process automation to escalate and ensure follow up.  We also offer a web portal to the help desk system to allow customers to open new calls and view history.  We have fully functional lab systems to enable us to test and determine recreate scenarios on reported issues.  STCR’s help desk team is available at any time of the day or night to help keep your store running smoothly. 

There is only one number you need to call – (607) 757-0181 - for any issue you have when you have the Help Desk coverage.  And in an effort to constantly improve our support services every customer has an opportunity to let us know how we are doing by participating in our ‘Satisfaction Call back’ process.  We understand the mission critical nature of the solutions we provide our customers and take pleasure in knowing we help them get the most out of their investment.  If you are interested in finding out how to get on our support plan, contact us right away.

PCI Requirement 9: Restrict Physical Access to Cardholder Data

This month’s topic is another of the 12 major requirements of PCI and may be easily overlooked as it does not necessarily involve the IT department or POS software.

This requirement relates to the physical access to areas that contain computers, printouts, hard drives, backups and other methods and objects that allow access to the cardholder data.  Some ways to meet the requirements of this section of PCI would include limiting access to the area with locked doors, and employee or visitor identification using passwords or secure badges. 

The use of video monitoring at entry and exit points will also help in identifying those entering or leaving the secure areas.  Another best practice is to destroy any media with cardholder data when it is no longer needed.  The idea is that if it no longer exists it cannot be compromised. 

The information supplement can be downloaded from the documents library on the PCI SSC website at https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/documents.php.

Three Tips to Make Your Small Business a Success

There are a variety of businesses but none of them are the same size.  In business, size does matter, especially if that size is small.  Believe it or not, according to the SBA’s office of Advocacy,
independent businesses with fewer than 500 employees represent 99.7% all employer firms.  Small business is often referred to as the “backbone” of the economy.  There are many reasons why but one of these is that between 1993 and 2009 small business accounted for 65% of the 15 million new jobs created.  Whether you are a current small business owner or whether you are thinking about starting a business here are some tips to help make it a success.

Take a risk:  You don’t want to spend the rest of your life wondering what if.  From the words of the famous novelist Mark Twain “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than the ones you did do.  Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade wins in your sail. Explore, dream, discover.” 

Focus on What Matters:  In small business, one of the things that matters the most is the customers.  Understandably the real goal of any business is to make money but without any customers - that is a hard fish to fry.  Instead of focusing on the latest and the greatest try to aim your focus more on what would make the customers want to come back again.  All it takes is one satisfied customer to tell a family member or a friend about their shopping experience and that could turn into two or three more future customers.  

Keep on Trucking:  It takes a while to take off and start developing into a well-known business.  The process of opening and maintaining a business involves hard work and dedication.  The initial opening of a business is a lot like pouring a foundation of concrete.  It takes quite a bit of time and effort for it to become solid but once it is set up you are left with a firm base to stand on.  Thomas Edison once said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

 

Super Food in Aruba - Grand Opening

Super Food in Oranjestad, Aruba opened the doors of its new state of the art store on November 29, 2012.  The average temperature on Aruba is between 77 -91 degrees Fahrenheit, therefore there is no need 

for a heating system.  With the high temperatures and plenty of sunshine, cooling is an important factor and is an aspect of the store where big economic, sustainability and comfort savings can be made. Building in the shade was the main theme in the development of the new supermarket.

Super Food created a unique roof design that reduces the direct heat caused by the sun’s rays. The roof’s skin absorbs the heat which is then naturally carried away by the wind.  By employing this type of cooling the limited heat that does penetrate inside the supermarket requires only a small amount of energy to manage.  Additionally, the sunny climate in Aruba is ideal for the use of solar panels. The new supermarket has solar panels installed to help generate energy. The store is part of the Green Aruba initiative. 

This beautiful, efficient new store installed STCR’s SMS Point of Sale solution to manage its front end scanning, back office and scale management.