Experience Is What It’s All About
This week’s Convenience Matters podcast takes a look at how to draw people to your stores.
Apr 15, 2020 | 2 min read
ALEXANDRIA, Va.—On this week’s episode of Convenience Matters, “The Future for Convenience is About Winning Trips,” NACS hosts Jeff Lenard, vice president of strategic industry initiatives, and Donovan Woods, director of operations for the Fuels Institute, discuss how to get traffic up in convenience stores with Lori Stillman, vice president of research for NACS.
“You should pull the lens back and take a look at what really matters as you think about the future,” Stillman said. “What comes top of mind to me is it’s all about experience. If you aren’t delivering on a fantastic, memorable customer experience in this world of anywhere convenience, the ability for somebody to just walk across the street or swipe their phone to get the exact same thing is greater than ever, so experience is what it’s all about.”
Today, that experience is not just against other convenience retailers—it’s against all other brick-and-mortar stores and even online retailers. “There are so many different ways that a need can be fulfilled today,” Stillman said.
Measuring experience isn’t tricky. “First and foremost is frequency of visits,” Stillman said. “We look at trips in our industry as a really important thing, because we know with that trip, there’s something driving that trip….If we win the trip, how do we build the basket?”
Data becomes valuable in helping retailers figure that out. Stillman has a series of questions that data can answer that can help determine what shoppers are after. “Who’s the shopper? What’s the trip motivator? What are they most likely buying, either in our stores or somewhere else? How do we make our store, that moment to get them to say, ‘I’ll take that too,’” she said.
Each week a new Convenience Matters episode is released. With more than 200 episodes to choose from, the podcast can be heard on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play and other podcast apps and YouTube and at www.conveniencematters.com. Episodes have been downloaded more than 130,000 times by listeners around the world.
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