Using Technology to Preempt the C-store Customer’s Path to Purchase

It’s the age-old proposition in the convenience store industry: How do you move customers from the forecourt/gas pump area inside to the store? There are so many factors here working in tandem. If you write a flowchart, it may look something like this: Clean, well-lit, inviting environment for the customer to want to fill up →  well-placed and accurate promotional signage → (if available) working TVs/digital signage at the pump.There’s a similar flow inside the store: Clean, well-lit store → well-placed, accurately priced products and promotions → adequate customer service and POS technology to complete the sale. You begin to see that upselling to an in-store purchase basically comes down to 3 components:

1. The manual component: a clean, well-maintained forecourt and a clean, well-stocked store
2. The technology component: ensures vendor/retailer promotional prices are properly reflected
3. The labor/staffing component: for exceptional customer service

The reality is that in-store sales software is just that—in-store. It can tell you how many iced teas you sold in the summer, but it’s not going to tell you if the promotional signage in the forecourt told customers they should come inside for a buy-one-get-one free deal. Software won’t tell you if your employees at the foodservice counter promoted the new food item or handled the food with the proper food storage and handling techniques. Software doesn’t provide information on the environment—it only informs about the result.

Pre-Empting the Result

So who are the retailers that answer the age-old proposition? They’re the ones who manage to pre-empt the result by creating informed processes based on what they know works. They’ve broken the 3 key components down to task management as follows:

1. Processes to clean the store to maintain a welcoming and safe environment.
2. Working technology—and that doesn’t necessarily mean digital pumps. It could mean conducting a security audit of payment terminals, especially in a time of targeted criminal activity. These are the kind of safeguards that are crucial to your brand.
3. Real-time store-level insights that could note staffing levels and any other issues that may occur. Say for a period of a month, you send a district manager to a group of stores to complete an operational audit during the peak time of the weekday.

Sample questions could be:

• Are there enough attendants at the pumps?
• Are the foodservice attendants following safe food handling and preparation procedures?
• Are there at least two cashiers manning the registers?
• Are gas pump payment systems secure and showing no signs of tampering?

Using a mobile solution like Zenput, senior management can not only create the audit to ensure key tasks are completed, but they can also customize the parameters and get automatically notifiy the appropriate employees when exceptions arise. These are the actionable insights that help retailers improve their operations and as a result, their bottom lines. Learn more about Zenput’s real-time retail execution capabilities by clicking here. See Also: Converting Your Forecourt into a Moneymaker Today’s Forecourt: Opportunities to Convert Customers from the Pump Auditing Branded Gas Station Forecourts Can Increase Supplier Payments