If you find it hard to hire and retain good employees for your convenience and fuel retail (CFR) business, you’re not alone. 87% of retail leaders are worried about talent shortages in 2023, and 74% of retailers expect challenges in filling customer-facing positions.
Many retailers have incorporated self-checkout into their operations to mitigate labor shortages. This trend is also sweeping the CFR industry, with many operators turning to self-service checkouts to stay competitive.
While self-checkout systems have been around for a few years, their adoption has accelerated recently because they help store operators reduce reliance on human labor. For example, instead of hiring five cashiers for five traditional checkout lanes, you can hire one person to monitor five self-checkout stations.
8 Steps to Thrive During Labor Shortages with Self-Checkout Retail Technology
1. Deploy Existing Resources Strategically
Integrating self-service checkout allows you to redeploy existing employees from cashier duty. You can retrain staff members who are already familiar with your operations to perform other functions (e.g., food service, inventory management) to fill positions faster and at a lower cost.
2. Increase Employee Satisfaction and Retention
Self-checkout technologies provide the much-needed automation capabilities to lighten employees’ workload. You can help them reduce stress and avoid burnout — a major reason people leave their job — without impacting your business’s performance.
3. Improve Security and Theft Prevention
When your staff is stretched thin, they can't keep an eye on customers and merchandise. Freeing up staff members from the registers means more of them can be on the floor to monitor store activities and deter theft.
4. Reduce Labor Costs
By cutting the number of cashiers you need to run a store, you can lower labor costs and reallocate your budget to other business growth areas, such as improving operational efficiency, enhancing the customer experience, and investing in new technologies.
5. Meet Customer Expectations
Since 56% of consumers prefer self-checkout over cashiers, it helps you kill two birds with one stone: Hire fewer employees while improving the customer experience. Plus, your staff can focus on value-add services to distinguish your brand from the competition.
6. Add New Offerings Cost-Effectively
Adding new offerings like food service can help convenience stores meet market demands and stay competitive. Self-service checkout technology can help you automate ordering so you don’t have to hire more employees to support your expansion.
7. Optimize Staffing Decisions
Advanced self-checkout technology integrates with your point of sale (POS) solution to generate real-time insights about in-store activities. For example, you can use analytics to identify peak times and adjust your staffing plan to optimize sales and customer experience.
8. Future-Proof Your Business
Investing in a self-checkout system not only helps you ride out the current labor shortage. It also prepares your business to weather economic downturns, labor challenges, and other market disruptions that can impact your ability to hire and retain employees in the future.
Implementing the Right Self-Checkout Technology For Your Convenience Store
Not all self-checkout stations are created equal. People prefer familiar technologies and interfaces, like those they encounter at major retailers like Walmart, Target, or Home Depot. An unfamiliar user flow often leads to frustration and impacts the customer experience — driving shoppers back to traditional checkout lanes.
Additionally, your self-checkout should be part of a POS system that meets the needs of CFR. For example, your solution should support food service, loyalty programs, fuel sales, and fuel card integration to streamline operations and deliver a seamless customer experience.
That’s why DUMAC partners with NCR — a leading POS hardware and software provider — to provide best-of-breed self-checkout solutions to our customers in CFR.
NCR RPOS includes advanced features such as:
- cash management and coin recycling,
- automatic age verification,
- shrink and theft monitoring, and
- configurations for normal and peak times.
The system:
- offers an intuitive user interface,
- provides fast transactions,
- accepts different payment methods, and
- supports mobile commerce to help you stay ahead of the game.
But the best technology won’t deliver the optimal outcomes if it isn’t tailored to your store's needs. That’s why we don’t just sell you the product.
DUMAC delivers from A to Z:
- Defining your requirements
- Optimizing the configuration
- Designing the traffic flow
- Providing on-site implementation services
- We also offer ongoing support and different levels of managed services depending on your IT needs.
Fortune 500 companies trust NCR’s systems to deliver modern and outstanding customer experiences. DUMAC helps smaller, multi-store CFR owners take advantage of the technology without the deep pocket.
Learn more about our CFR POS solution for convenience stores and see how we help you break out of the status quo, meet the latest customer expectations, and stay ahead of the curve.
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