The first EuroCIS for Snabble under its own name was more successful than we could have ever imagined. Only one year ago we showed our product at the tarent booth and really came a long way. We had so many interested retailers at our booth that we oftentimes ran out of space and had to occupy the surrounding lanes.
After the first day of EuroCIS, EHI Retail Institute hosted the festive and annual Retail Technology Awards Europe. EDEKA Paschmann and snabble won this award for Best Customer Experience. Read more about our winning solution below.
The main business issue
Checkout areas are the bottleneck of every store. Their efficiency is limited by parameters like space, technology and operating personnel. Long queues not only take up lot of space without generating revenue, they also frustrate customers immensely. A study by Capgemini shows that two out of three customers see long checkout lines as their main frustration.
It can only be guessed how much revenue is lost because of customers going to a different store where they expect shorter waiting times. Or even worse, customers that are already in the store, aborting their shopping and leave being unsatisfied.
On the other hand, having the right amount of checkout lines open has always been a struggle for retailers. The classic checkout lines do not scale well, cost lots of money and always need operating employees. Even modern self-checkout terminals are expensive, need maintenance and are complicated to use for customers.
How we solved the problem
Customers simply download the Snabble app and start scanning their items without prior registration or login. Scanned items are then added to the digital cart. The total amount is always visible while scanning. When a customer is done, they can control their purchase in the digital cart and proceed to payment. Payment is done at the existing self-checkout terminals (without additional hardware or scanning the items again) or via simple online payment from within the app. Afterwards, the user leaves the store and gets a digital receipt.
Customers save time by skipping the line and not having to put items on the belt and back into the cart. Additionally, the retailer spreads the time consuming scanning process throughout the whole store. Regarding theft protection, an additional software helps employees to supervise and control customers without interrupting their seamless experience.
Reached benefits
During an open beta test (without online payment), we asked customers to give feedback after regularly using the Snabble app for 3 weeks, with remarkable results:
- 95% state that shopping with Snabble is better than without
- 92% think the Snabble app was easy to understand and use (while the remaining 8% had problems to understand how to handle payment at self-checkout terminals, which is obsolete after the integration of online payment)
- 93% say they will continue to use the Snabble app
- 80% especially liked that they don’t have to put their items on the belt
- 69% liked having the total cart amount always visible
- 66% stated that they would like to pay online within the app to save more time
For EDEKA Paschmann this results in higher productivity of checkout zones, lower checkout costs per customer and an increase in customer satisfaction and loyalty.
