At a high level, technology gives you more visibility into sales, inventory and machine performance. And having more data at your disposal helps you make more informed decisions about how to grow your operation – where to invest, where to pull back, how to adjust your strategy to stay competitive and win new clients. But technology can also help you do so much more. It can help you secure your customer relationships and personalize the self-service retail experience.
Learn what types of technology other operators are leveraging to add value to their services, improve and protect their margins, and gain a better understanding of how their business is running.
Getting full visibility into performance with telemetry
“With telemetry, we can now see things in real time. We’re not waiting on a driver to get to a machine or relying on a customer to call to say they need a restock. It’s helped our communication with suppliers and within our operations team to just have all this info at our fingertips.” – Kyle Murphy, Buffalo Rock.
Have you thought much about the telemeter technology that can come with your card reader? Not only does it help you to accept cashless payments, but it also gives you real-time info on machine performance and inventory data.
So, take advantage of the reports and functionality enabled by that little device inside your vending machine. It really can help you grow and optimize your vending business.
Keeping up with inflation via Remote Price Change
“Remote Price Change is that valuable to us. At one of our large university locations (400 vending machines), it used to take us three weeks to do a price change. Now, it takes three days. It's been a huge change.” – Tim McAra, Continental Services.
If you think about what it takes to manually update prices at each of your vending machines, you realize how much time and cost it takes. A back-office staffer needs to do the work of determining the price changes for every product, and a driver needs to go to each location and make the updates in the machine. And that’s not even counting the price of gas.
New technology like Remote Price Change cuts the amount of time required for product price changes. As suppliers continue to raise product prices and you pass them along to consumers, it’s a useful tool to help protect your margins.
Delighting consumers with loyalty and rewards programs
“Loyalty thing is the next big thing. It’s especially an opportunity with markets. The more that your customers purchase with loyalty points and use bundle deals and promotions, that's just driving value.” – Justin Packrone, James Vending.
If you have any micro market locations or accounts that bring a regular set of customers – breakrooms, universities, apartment complexes – it’s time to think about implementing loyalty and rewards programs. By offering loyalty rewards or incentives, you can get more data on your customers’ buying habits, which can help you customize offerings and promotions to further personalize the self-service experience. Your market management system likely has this functionality available, so it’s worth exploring.
There are several tools and platforms available that can help you get more visibility into your business performance, better manage your margins, and delight your customers. By leveraging the right technology, you can help ensure the continued success of your operation.
