Over the last few years, leading c-stores have made significant progress on modernization initiatives like installing self-service checkout, integrating QSR offerings, and building out app-based loyalty programs. What’s next? What else can c-stores do to differentiate themselves, offer immersive experiences for customers, and increase profitability?
Orchestrate omni-channel experiences
Now that you likely have multiple device-based touchpoints for both your employees and customers, is the experience consistent? Is the employee experience the same (or at least similar) across POS, inventory management and other employee-facing devices? Is the customer experience consistent when they use the self-checkout, interact with kiosks and use the mobile app?
Across devices and other user-facing technology, ensure you have the ability to deliver consistent experiences. You might have invested in a cutting-edge mobile app that wows customers, but the brand affinity that you gained will be lost if their experience with in-store devices doesn’t match.
Whether it’s running a new corporate marketing campaign, delivering new experiences and offerings or pushing a security patch update, you need to be confident that updates make it all the way through your systems to the endpoints that your employees and customers interact with.
Esper worked with Parker’s Kitchen to create a new self-service solution that could deliver an updated customer loyalty program. With new kiosks, POS terminals, touchscreen monitors and more—all pre-loaded with Esper on it, Parker’s gained full control of their customer-facing devices centralized on Esper. As a result, they were able to implement fast, consistently deploy updates, consolidate resources with better orchestration and save 60% on operating expenses.
Drive operational excellence
Implementing new technology is exciting, but to ensure ROI, c-stores must now focus on optimizing program execution. Are you deploying resources to get the most out of your technology investments?
From training employees on new devices and systems, to ensuring integration and communication between systems, to reallocating resources, there are several areas to streamline processes and ultimately reduce operating expenses.
We worked with a CIO to streamline and modernize their device management across their fleet, consolidating the device stack across franchise stores around the world. This allowed them to have each IT operations manager own a much larger and broader group of devices. By creating device templates with set configurations for each of their variety of use cases, deploying, managing, updating and monitoring those devices became much more automated. For example, the IT operations managers can push updates and changes with the confidence that they understand what is going on with each device and the systems it is integrated with. Now, not only do they have a modern user experience, they also have a more streamlined day-to-day operation that saves them money.
Act on data-driven insights
With all of the new data that you’re collecting (e.g. device health and telemetry, customer purchase data), use it to test, make improvements and accelerate innovation. According to a survey by Incisiv and Toshiba, three out of every four c-store executives believe they need to be more nimble to experiment with new ideas and adapt to changing shopper expectations.
One way to do that is to use the data to gain control and confidence when rolling out updates, so you can do it more frequently and predictably. This is done using device pipelines to stage updates. Pipelines let you limit the potential blast radius, using data to automate the rollout and testing before pushing to a larger set of devices.
Cloud-based technologies have been pushing updates through pipelines for years, using the concept of DevOps to accelerate how frequently they deploy updates. Now that you’ve modernized parts of your infrastructure, you, too, can benefit from DevOps principles and practices.
Now that you have some modernization programs under your belt, it’s time to double-down on orchestration and operational excellence and continue to build your innovation muscle. At Esper, we’ve worked with c-stores on a broad set of modernization use cases using the power of devices. Connect with our team of experts to learn how you can take your next step.