Address Labor Challenges with Self-Service Technologies
As labor shortage issues continue, hiring qualified team members remains a big concern and forefront priority for many convenience-store retailers. But, hiring is only one piece of the labor puzzle: Retaining trained, experienced employees and boosting efficiency to decrease labor demands overall are crucial to boosting the bottom line.
The current labor market is challenging, but key technology enhancement strategies can help give c-stores a leg up on the competition. By streamlining operations with best practices and technologies, retailers not only decrease labor demands in the store, but also improve working conditions and customer experiences by relieving stress among staff.
Market recovery calls for increased efficiency
Finding answers to current labor challenges is a time-sensitive matter. Most c-store retailers say they’re confident that foot traffic will increase in the next six months, according to Technomic’s Oct. 2021 C-Store Operator Update. Consumers resuming their commuting routines for work and school will continue to increase in-store sales volumes, especially during morning and evening rush hours and mealtimes. This promising news means that, in the coming months, retailers will likely benefit by planning to accommodate more in-store shoppers, whether they do so by building up their workforces, investing in new technologies, streamlining key processes—or a combination of all of the above.
In the current labor market, recruiting and retaining a robust employee base remains difficult. According to Technomic’s C-Store Operator Update, one in five operators say that staffing is a key concern, and more than half consider their stores to be understaffed. The consequences naturally fall on convenience’s more labor-intensive categories: For example, 60% of operators say staffing challenges have had a negative effect on their foodservice sales.
Finding ways to decrease stress for current employees and to focus labor where it’s needed most is crucial to success across the store—and self-service technologies can be a great way to let consumers take the shopping experience into their own hands.
Self-service amenities offer a solution
Decreasing labor demands benefits everyone; it can improve the store’s work environment, quality of customer service and margins overall.
Deploying self-checkout to offset labor-management issues—especially now during the current shortage—has been proven effective and can provide staff opportunities to focus on performing more value-added tasks: Team members can pay extra attention to customer needs, such as foodservice on top of the convenience of self-checkout.
Each retailer’s considerations for implementing self-service technology are unique, and it becomes critical they have a trusted technology partner to work with. DUMAC works with customers to determine the best self-checkout solution to deliver based on store size and volume and technology based on ROI calculations and data-driven facts.
Solutions from DUMAC, including customer self-checkout, can revolutionize c-store operations by saving labor, speeding up transactions and enhancing security, among other additional benefits—all while increasing efficiencies and boosting a store’s bottom line. DUMAC partners with NCR Corporation to deploy the Fastlane Self-Checkout units, which feature an intuitive interface to ensure each shopper can check out quickly and seamlessly. Advanced features such as cash management and coin recycling; automatic age verification; shrink and theft monitoring; and configurability for normal and peak traffic hours means employees spend minimal time attending to checkout, if any.
For many retailers, making the most of market recovery in the coming months will mean all hands on deck—and DUMAC self-checkout solutions can give store efficiency a major boost. To learn more, click here.
This post is sponsored by Dumac Business Systems