How retailers can improve self-checkout

Retailers, who want to reduce labor costs, are determined to make that decision a lot easier.

The pandemic has helped. In 2020, shipments of self-checkout machines rose 25% globally, according to research and consulting firm RBR, as the pandemic prompted more shoppers to seek a way to avoid contact with other people.

And there’s no doubt that the technology for self-checkout has improved over the years; Shoppers are much less likely to find an “unexpected item in the bagging area,” forcing them to wait for a store employee to continue shopping. But the customer experience is still not perfect. Customers may face delays due to difficult-to-scan items, the inability to find codes for the product they are purchasing, or weighing errors that require an employee to fix. Other failure points include bagging and payment. In fact, in a survey of 2,000 shoppers and retailers by customer-experience-technology company Radiant, 67% said they experienced some sort of failure at self-service checkout.

“Most of the time you go and use self-checkout, there’s a problem,” says Max Hammond, a senior director at Gartner Inc., a research firm.

In their effort to address these issues, retailers and researchers have learned a great deal about how things can go wrong with self-checkout, how consumers understand the technology, and how retailers can use it. What needs to be done to get more people?

People are more inclined to use self-checkout, but they can easily turn off after a bad experience.

Recent surveys show that customers are warming up to self-checkout machines. Before the pandemic, some 30% of consumers preferred to use self-checkout, but that figure jumped to 45% in the first 18 months of the pandemic, according to Praveen Adi, a partner at McKinsey who is part of the firm’s retail-operating practice. lead. Of America. What’s more, the proportion of consumers who said they were more likely to use self-checkout before the pandemic increased to 36% in August 2021, from 27% in March 2020.

However, if customers have a poor experience with self-checkout, they are less likely to use it again. According to a Radiant survey, 25% of respondents said they would not use self-service checkout if they had previously used machines but they did not work. And so what the pandemic gave retailers could just as easily be snatched away.

During COVID, “a lot of retailers and even hospitality and restaurant people quickly pointed the gun” [self-checkout] “The kiosks within their locations without really thinking about the customer experience and how to design that experience,” says Bobby Marmat, chief executive of Radiant.

The user experience isn’t intuitive enough, especially for those less comfortable with technology.

“These solutions can always be vague, so it’s generally not the easiest process for all consumers. The younger generation is obviously going to understand this a bit more,” says Mr. Hammond.

It’s often the little things that can make all the difference. Sometimes, for example, customers are not aware that an item has been scanned because they do not hear a confirmation sound. Or they have to keep moving an object so that the barcode is registered with the scanner.

“Part of it is generational, and part of it is in a hurry,” says Reed Hayes, a criminologist at the University of Florida and director of the Loss Prevention Research Council, a retail-industry trade group. He says the machines need to evolve to a point where you “don’t have to go back and forth in front of the scanner multiple times.”

Scanning takes a lot of steps.

While scanning non-perishable items with bar codes can go smoothly, customers may encounter problems with items that don’t have bar codes—including products—for which codes can be viewed and scaled. needs to be weighed.

“There are some items that are multiple keystrokes, like production that the camera doesn’t recognize, and then you need to type in a number, and the number may or may not be there, and sometimes it’s easier to have a store associate. “Do it for you,” says Sucharita Kodali, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

To address this problem, Toshiba, which manufactures self-checkout kiosks, says it is working with retailers on computer-vision and artificial-intelligence-based tools to enable scan-to-scan machines. To allow the item to be identified more easily. Similarly, NCR Corp. provides software for self-checkout machines that use computer-vision technology to identify produce placed at scale. It then brings up a shortlist of the most likely items from which the customer can choose.

Any problem can cause annoying delays.

Maley Retailers deploy staff members to host self-checkout lanes to troubleshoot issues as they arise. But as many shoppers know, these accessories can become overwhelmed, or a struggling shopper may not notice. That’s why the shopkeepers are waiting for help to come.

According to McKinsey’s Mr. Adi, if the self-checkout machine can only be unlocked by a colleague, it may take about 30 to 60 seconds for an employee to come and fix the problem.

According to NCR, manufacturers are trying to address this pain point by reducing the need for a staff member to be physically present at self-checkout kiosks. For example, shoppers may be able to delete products they’ve already scanned, or employees may have a mobile application that allows them to remotely clear transactions on their phones.

Layout limits can discourage self-checkout use.

Self-checkout machines are often located near each other in a close, tight configuration, discouraging customers from scanning large quantities of items, or items that are usually too large for traditional self-checkout machines. We do.

“The typical layout of the self-checkout area, plus, ‘put your stuff here and bag it here,’ doesn’t work very well if you have a lot of items, or you have a couple of Kids With You,” says Steve Dennis, president of Sageberry Consulting, a retail consulting firm. (According to Ms. Kodali of Forrester, self-checkout is optimal for a cart that has no more than 10 items.)

Some retailers, such as Home Depot, have attempted to solve this problem with “scan guns”.

Toshiba says it is working with retailers to help them customize their own checkout stations. In addition, says Fredrik Karlegren, vice president of global marketing at Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions, the solution may lie outside the self-checkout realm. “There are other methods throughout the store where you want to repack things and apply stickers and bar codes so that it’s easy to use and easy to go through self-checkout.”

Many customers are not convinced there is any value to them.

whereas The use of self-checkout is on the rise, with holdouts agreeing to adopt it will mean ensuring employees have an added benefit in addition to doing the work they would otherwise do. For example, customers need to know that it’s going to be consistently faster, or that they might be able to get a discount for going the self-checkout route.

“The Problem With Self-Service Checkout Is That There’s No Profit [to the consumer]— there’s only cost,” says Ryan Buell, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School.

Ultimately, this could all be controversial, and self-checkout will be a transition technology to something more like Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology. First launched in 2016 for employees and more widely in 2018 and now used in dozens of Amazon stores in the US and UK, as well as 14 third-party stores – when products are taken off the shelves or When returned, the technology automatically detects them, and it keeps track of them in the virtual cart. When customers finish shopping, they skip the checkout line and leave the store and are automatically charged.

Although experts say the technology is too expensive for most large retail stores, Mr. Buell says that’s where retailers are eventually going.

“When we think about where we deploy human capital, you don’t have to checkout people,” he says. “By scale, technology can do that job and do that job well. I don’t think we’ll get into a place where technology does that work with the help of customers who do the job well.” are not equipped to do so.”

This story has been published without modification to the text from a wire agency feed