Owning and running an independently operated convenience retail store is difficult. You have late nights, early mornings, and strong competition. You worry about losing customers to new retailers that open down the street, but you’re not sure if their openings have affected your business. How can you tell?
Putting in the Hours
Imagine this: You don’t have a software in place to quickly run a report to show you if your business has been impacted by new competition, so you plan to stay up late to run through the numbers from the week. Some questions run through your mind: Do I need to run a promotion? Do I need to adjust my pricing? You’re not sure, but you do know it’s going to take hours to finish looking through the numbers after an already long day in the store. Now it’s going to be a long night too.
The next morning, after arriving at your store early, you start the day by going through a pricing ritual. Last night’s numbers are still in your head, and you’re trying to reference them to make the right pricing adjustments. You begin walking around the store, adjusting prices and marking those adjustments down so you can make updates at your point-of-sale (POS). It’s time consuming, but you think, “the hassle is worth it to have my customers buy from me, not my competitor.” You hope your calculations are accurate.
The scary part about the above scenario is that despite all the hard work put into running numbers, calculating prices, making pricing adjustments, and recording those changes into the POS, you still don’t have peace of mind. You’re looking for more knowledge to help you run your store, but don’t have a way to confirm if the choices you’ve made will help. To compensate, you put in more hours at the store trying to do the best you can to focus on customers and keep them walking through the door. It’s time to focus on what really matters to you: running your operations smarter and focusing more time directly on your customers.
Having More Time
So, I bet you’re asking, “how do I run my operations smarter and focus more time on my customers?” By using the right software to help support your store. That’s how you’re set up to accomplish both.
When the right software is in place, the number of manual tasks, and therefore, time spent during non-work hours is reduced, and causes little to no effort on you, the operator. Sound too good to be true? You’ll have to trust that it’s not. Because the right tools make it easier, faster, and more efficient for you to do the work, giving you time back to focus on making connections with your customers and providing them with the services they want and need.
Imagine a new scenario: You lock up your store and drive home after a typical day in your convenience store. Once home, you open your laptop and check the automated reports for your store from earlier in the day and compare them to reports from the week prior, all with just an internet connection. You feel happy and satisfied that the information is accurate, since it’s automatically pulled from your system and run through an algorithm for you – no more late nights staying up to look at numbers manually, and no more accidental human errors.
The next morning you go in and pull out your smartphone to begin scanning and adjusting prices for the items you decided need a boost. Such as the new brand of chips you started carrying but isn’t selling as you expected. Next week, you look at the reports to see if your promotion generated the lift you wanted and decide to keep running it for another week. The right data at your fingertips helps you make easy and informed decisions.
With security and real-time access from anywhere, you have the data visibility you need and want, without the lengthy process it took before. These reports keep you informed on the inventory that is selling fast and provide insights for your promotions – all to help keep your business competitive and better serve customers.
Operating Smarter
The access to accurate, real-time reports can be at your fingertips. Check your numbers daily, understand trends, run promotions, adjust pricing, and more, with the right software to help you. The visibility gives you the efficiency to operate smarter, not harder. Have the confidence, backed by the security of knowledge, to compete with larger c-stores.
Try PDI CStore Essentials for free today to help with your customer retention, traffic and loyalty.
