For today’s consumer, leisure
and retail have become ever-more intertwined – shoppers
now treat their ‘retail therapy’ as a leisure experience
while visitors to leisure attractions increasingly see themselves
as consumers and expect their experience to include a satisfying
visit to the gift shop.
The leisure industry has always aimed to give its customers
a great day out. However, now attractions have recognised the
growing importance of their retail operation in achieving this
objective, after all some 31% of their income derives from this
source. The challenge is to ensure that their retail operation
is capable of delivering the essentials: fast and efficient
customer service, effective merchandising, and comprehensive
management reporting.
This challenge formed the central theme of a unique ‘Thought
Leadership Workshop’ held at the Royal Academy on Thursday
26th February 2004, which was sponsored by Itim Technology Solutions
and Epson. Over 70 senior personnel from many of the UK’s
leading sport and leisure attractions attended the highly successful
event, including Legoland Windsor, The Science Museum, The National
Trust, and Manchester City Football Club Plc.
Hosted by Juliana Gilling, the editor of Attractions Management
Magazine, the workshop was the ideal opportunity for leisure
retailers to share their experiences, discuss current challenges
and seek advice from the experts. The event featured entertaining
and informative presentations which addressed the key issue
facing leisure sector retailers – how to take advantage
of advanced retail technology to enhance service, maximise sales
and increase efficiency.
What
the attendees thought:
“I found the event
thought provoking and stimulating and came away with so many
ideas that my staff are now busy trying to implement them. Let’s
hope that some will be successful!” Stuart
Garman, RAF Museum
“I found the workshop
extremely worthwhile – there was a very high quality of
speakers and it was great to have a chance to share experiences
with similar (and dissimilar) organisations.” Caroline
Winnicott, Museum of Modern Art
“I found
the speakers very interesting and enjoyed the session very much.
It was good to have an insight into other businesses in the
leisure industry and see the contrasting issues and problem-solving
(approach) each one of them adopts.” Dene
Myers, Watford Football Club
The presentations: Macro overview and insights
from the US Jim Crawford, Vice President, Retail Forward
In a highly enjoyable keynote speech, Jim used examples from
the US to illustrate his personal view of how the nature and
purpose of retail is changing. He then challenged his audience
to decide which element of today’s ‘multi-faceted’
consumer they were trying to satisfy – did they simply
want to offer speedy, low-cost replenishment, or provide an
experience which educates, informs, or entertains? Jim also
looked into his crystal ball to describe the retail store of
tomorrow where management would be able to look at operations
in real time and offer the customer speed, convenience, loyalty
promotions and a multi-channel experience. In Jim’s view,
technology has a key role in delivering this new shopping experience
but all too often, retailers have been in thrall to new technology,
rather than using it to drive their business forward.
“Today’s retailers may know what is in-store and
what customers are buying but they don’t know what the
customer didn’t buy and therefore what they should sell.
Let’s expand the envelope of technology to cover the whole
shopping experience so we can stay in touch with the needs of
customers.”
Technology insight Derek Littlewood, Pre-sales
Support Manager, Epson UK
In Derek’s view, the point of sale is where leisure retailers
have the customer at their mercy and poor performance at this
point can leave the customer with a bad impression of the whole
store. It is therefore essential that leisure attractions invest
in PoS systems and peripherals which are reliable, easy to use
and deliver fast transaction times. Beyond this, there is also
an opportunity to enhance service by increasing the confidence
of operators to interact with customers and not the EPoS system
(touchscreen is an intuitive interface which is ideal for this
purpose); as well as communicate messages through high impact
receipts.
“The point of sale is the moment of
truth when the customer parts with their money. Let’s
make that parting as painless as possible for both you and the
customer”
Simon Curtis, MD, Itim Technology Solutions
An avid believer in the importance of great service as a tool
to maximise sales, Simon outlined his vision of retail in the
leisure sector. In his opinion, leisure retailers should be
wary of being wowed by technology for its own sake. Instead,
they should concentrate on using technology to establish the
building blocks of success. These were: a secure, reliable and
easy-to-use EPoS system to optimise the transaction process;
flexible service points with the ability to respond quickly
to queues; in-store promotions and loyalty schemes which could
be linked to number of visitors or membership (in the case of
football clubs); and supply chain agility with real time sales
information across different sales channels.
“In
the past, retail was all about recognising individual customers
and communicating with them in order to increase sales –
today’s retailers may be more sophisticated but they are
struggling to emulate the levels of service which they provided
in the past. The challenge for each leisure retailer is to generate
more opportunities to connect with the customer in order to
maximise sales.”
Customer insight Dan Murphy, Co-author, Retail
Therapy and Partner, Itim Consulting In Dan’s assessment, leisure operators could usefully
learn from the lessons of the major retail chains where drivers
such as economies of scale and standardisation of processes
have increased efficiency for the retailer but proved impersonal
and unresponsive for the customer. Stressing that customer loyalty
was increasingly only for rent, Dan emphasised that leisure
retailers needed to focus their offer – from product range,
to promotions, to management data – on building a relationship
with the customer.
“I want to conclude with a
quote from Jacques Nasser, the ex-CEO of Ford Motors which encapsulates
what we need to do: ‘We must get to the point where transaction
becomes incidental to the relationship (with the customer)”
Practical insight John Barford,
Commercial Director, the Royal Academy
The Royal Academy’s four retail outlets handle around
350,000 transactions per year; however the attraction’s
EPoS solution was slow, bulky, and out of date. In his presentation,
John outlined the selection requirements used by the Royal Academy
when it installed a new retail management system from Itim,
running on Epson SR-600 touchscreen terminals. These included
faster transactions, integrated EFT, the ability to handle multiple
selling prices for catalogues and other items, and, most importantly,
ease of adoption by sales staff.
“We have calculated
that the introduction of touchscreen ‘hot keys’,
has saved us 10 seconds per transaction – 80 hours per
calendar month – and has had a high impact on customer
service. What’s more, the touchscreen terminals are so
intuitive that one long-standing member of staff (who had been
working here for 23 years) actually thanked me for introducing
the new technology.”
Chris Mines, Retail
Manager, BA London Eye
Imagine operating a retail operation for the UK’s most
popular paid-for visitor attraction in just 33m2 of merchandising
space. This was the challenge facing Chris Mines at the BA London
Eye and the limited space was a major source of congestion and
queues, not to mention lost sales opportunities. Chris explained
how the introduction of mobile Points of Sale at the attraction
enabled the BA London Eye to overcome the limited network cabling
while increasing turnover, reducing queues and benefiting from
increased flexibility.
“The mobile PoS is a great
example of how technology has enabled us to take advantage of
the entrepreneurial qualities of our staff.”
Audience poll:
As part of the workshop, attendees were asked to fill in a questionnaire,
giving their views on retail technology and the leisure attractions
market, with some interesting results:
Positive
85% of respondents said that a differentiated
retail experience was very important or important in generating
revenue at leisure attractions
65% said in-store promotions were a very important or
important way of generating revenue at their attraction
Decisions about next-generation technology are made
at board level (34%) or by retail management personnel
(34%) rather than IT personnel (24%) with no experience
of the retail operation
58% offered a membership scheme to customers and 80%
offered retail discounts and promotions to members
65% said that improving customer service was a primary
goal of their next PoS upgrade (50% planned a major upgrade
to the PoS in the next two years)
Negative
79% did not capture customer information at the point of sale
91% had no clear breakdown of customer spend by customer
type (student, senior citizen etc)
Product out-of-stocks and long queues were the most
significant customer satisfaction issues facing respondents
63% did not offer in-store access to an e-commerce web
site
Retail Forward’s Jim Crawford, who presented the results
at the workshop, commented: “It was good to see the level
of concern about the customer’s experience; however I
had expected that more would have captured information at the
point or sale and used customer segmentation within their business.”
For further information contact Simon Curtis, Itim Tel: 01480
454 604 Email: scurtis@itim-ts.com.
