A Smooth and Seamless Retail Experience

Most retail stores have self-checkout systems that aim to increase the customer experience and make the whole checkout process much faster by avoiding queues. For the retail store, it also requires less staff to operate the tills. What are the disadvantages of self checkouts? Is there a better way to improve customer experience?

The Shortfalls of Self-Checkouts

Annually, it is estimated that retail stores lose up to $10 Billion from self-checkouts. These losses primarily stem from thefts, manipulation and mistakes by customers both purposefully and accidentally. In addition, they are not always solving the queue problem since build ups still occur in places and staff have to resolve regular issues at different stations as well as check age-restricted items.

Improving Customer Experience

Retail stores across the world are trying a variety of methods to use scan as you go systems, shopper assist and loyalty app programs to engage customers more and improve the overall shopper experience. The latter has proved to be more successful by driving revenue and profitability thanks to insights and data.

Loyalty Programs

As the stats go, 65% of businesses use loyalty programs to attract new customers, 57% to build a stronger emotional brand connection and 50% to get data insight about their customers. We have seen a wide variety of these programs, some successful but most actually missing the key point. Seems there are a few key players that employed this tactic and others just copied.

Loyalty apps have to be unique in a way, this will really help to drive emotional connection. Look to take it a step further by offering personalisation for every customer and understand why they came to your store. 100% of retailers should be looking to get data insights since almost $600 Billion is lost from overstocking and this could be avoided if you have data suggesting what user like and buy. These are known as data-driven decisions based on customer activity.

Checkout-less Service

Few retailers (amazon go being a good example) tried to implement a checkout-free system whereby users could just go in store, take what they need and walk out without any queues at all. Seems like a good idea, but what if you look at the risks and losses from self-checkouts?

In the case of Amazon, they tested this business model without any high-tech advertised and just have oversea labour manually adding items to peoples accounts. Could there be a better option?

Integrating Loyalty App and Checkout

As with most innovations, this should be tested in a niche retailer as it would be limited to only those who use the loyalty app. In fact, the app should be more general than just loyalty since it would enable customers to scan (or add from catalogue) items as they go along, generate a QR code and scan it at the exit of the store.

For sure, you would need human assistants on standby to check that procedures are followed correctly, but having an app-only service would reduce the losses of theft and misuse of self-checkouts. Of course, there is a limitation to the potential customers as it would be for mobile users only and relatively tech-savvy people.

We look forward to seeing this in action somewhere and would be happy to turn this vision into reality.