MONEY S
cotmid Co-operative recently announced it was updating the technology systems at the heart of
its store-based customer transaction and money handling operations. The retailer operates 350 retail outlets across
Scotland, Northern Ireland and the North of England, through its businesses, Scotmid Food, Semichem, The Fragrance House, funeral directors and post offices, and its property division. Scotmid is part of the Scotmid Co-operative Society, a retail organisation with outlets across Scotland, Northern Ireland and the North of England with annual revenues of £423 million. As part of a strategy to evolve the customer and
brand experience, it recently chose to deploy SelfServ Checkout systems from provider NCR across its 190 Scotmid Food convenience store chain. The deployment is also designed to increase the availability of products in the stores and improve customer service, with Scotmid staff moving from behind the checkout into the store to replenish stock quickly and help customers. “As we seek to evolve the Scotmid brand
experience for our tech-savvy customers and staff, instore technology leadership is a key differentiator,” stated Stewart Ross, Scotmid IT projects manager, at the time of the announcement (Scotmid introduces self-checkout instore,
RetailTechnology.co.uk, 30 October 2013). “We believe that technology, such as NCR SelfServ
Checkout, improves the effectiveness and profitability of our business as we seek to grow into new markets, such as premium convenience stories.” He added that Scotmid chose to work with NCR as “it has both the long-term retail market experience and innovation in self-checkout technology required to help us achieve our goals”. Ross told R
etail T
lighting to provide additional visual cues also help to make the system as intuitive to use as possible. Built-in theft prevention functionality is provided
by the use of a security scale for weight verification, and NCR makes electronic article surveillance (EAS) security tagging integration available for devices from providers, Sensormatic and Checkpoint. But it also maintains item integrity using self-learning techniques and a self-adjusting weight database to maximise the accuracy of the scanning and bagging process for customers. Other audio and visual prompts are included to quickly alert the shopper and attendant in the event of any errors. The retailer established its self-checkout
requirements early by closely evaluating feedback from customers before the work to procure the new store systems began. Ross described how it established that offering self-service checkout would meet its customers’ expectations, particularly inside the new Scotmid premium brand stores, where customers are likely to be early adopters of technology and embrace the concept more readily. “We hold regular customer focus groups and
test ideas with an online customer panel and this research identified that many of our customers wanted the option of using a self-service till,” he said. “Self checkouts can give customers more control when they are paying for their items, and can also speed up the serving times when a store is very busy. It’s all about giving our customers the choice of how they want to be served when shopping with Scotmid.” Like most retailers, Scotmid discovered people use
echnology that company did not
have a prior relationship with NCR. “Scotmid went to market to evaluate the self-checkout vendors and ran through various processes and workshops before selecting NCR as the project partner,” he explained. “We looked at NCR’s footprint in the self-checkout
world and quickly realised that they had a huge share of the retail market. From this point we held a workshop to determine the feasibility of using our existing PoS [point-of-sale] and linking into the NCR solution and very quickly we found we could deliver a solution to our customer that was intuitive and easy to use.” The SelfServ Checkout systems feature 15-inch
high resolution colour LCD touchscreens and offer integrated Hi-Fi audio, lead-through animation and multi-path screen flow capabilities. A human factors designed non-barcoded item look-up and ‘Follow me’
36 Winter 2014
self-checkout technology for speed and greater control when they shop. Independent studies show consumers are more likely to do repeat business with a retailer that provides self-checkout technology. NCR has said that its SelfServ Checkout reduces queue waiting times by up to 40%. “Retail brand experience is increasingly a point
of differentiation as people choose where to shop,” added Helen Wilde, retail business director at NCR UK. “In particular, today’s tech-savvy shoppers are looking for ways that retailers and the technology they deploy can make their lives easier, as time and good service becomes more valuable. NCR is working with customers like Scotmid to evolve their instore brand experience using the latest innovation in self-checkout technology.” Scotmid expects its strategy will have a positive
impact on profits, as well as improving customer satisfaction, for the fact it can also enable the redeployment of retail employees from front-end
www.retailtechnology.co.uk
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