Blog: How to Evolve Fuel and Convenience Environments in a Simple Way

The Fuel and convenience (F+C) industry is on the move like never before. At the recent NACS Show, we saw great ideas and concepts that shape the appealing environments of tomorrow, turning more and more into PLUS fuel instead of fuel PLUS. To create best in class customer experience and keep pace with the ever-changing industry, retailers need to orchestrate more and more touchpoints in their stores like traditional checkout environments, self-checkout or kiosk systems, mobile devices, electric vehicle charging stations and more. Technology can play an important role to simplify F+C environments and here are a few examples of how to make processes easier for consumers, staff members and the retailer.

Creating Consumer friendly fuel and convenience retail environments
To keep up with the rising expectations in speedy but convenient journeys, retailers need to integrate advanced technologies like self-service or AI as key success factors for their business. Self-ordering kiosks, for example, are an excellent way to enable consumers to choose meals and additional items from the menu at their own pace, leading to increased basked sizes of up to 30%. Reducing friction at the checkout is another great example of what retailers should consider to make the shopper journey as seamless as possible. New AI-powered solutions to automatically verify someone’s age when buying age-restricted items at the counter is one option to improve the experience. Another technology is AI-powered multi-item recognition, especially in c-stores as most shopping baskets only contain a few items. The most convenient way for the consumer is to capture multiple items in one step, instead of one after another.

Improving Workplace Efficiency with AI-Powered Technologies
Self-service technology at the checkout or for self-service food ordering not only improves the shopper’s journey. It also frees up staff members for more valuable tasks like expanding consumer services, instead of being locked behind a counter most of the day with all other tasks pressing in the background. Additionally, new AI-powered solutions help them to better deal with potentially critical interventions. We learned from many retailers that asking for an age ID often leads to uncomfortable and sometimes, even hostile situations. Automated age verification helps defuse these encounters by shifting the responsibility to the system, making the process feel more impartial. In addition, modern AI-powered shrink solutions that analyze shopper’s behavior at the checkout or across the store can also reduce personal interventions and better prepare staff members in case specific actions are needed. For example, our AI-powered shrink reduction solution has been designed with retailers to identify shrink, and to improve actionable practices to prevent it. This approach prioritizes both staff efficiency and customer experience. It provides retailers a range of actionable insights to combat shrink effectively while maintaining a positive shopping environment. In recent pilots, we have achieved over 80% self-rectification through a number of customer nudging events, reducing the need for direct staff intervention. By giving employees the right tools—like video recording capabilities and real time data—retailers can handle incidents more professionally, minimizing risk and maintaining customer trust. Moreover, this technology helps create a safer, more attractive workplace, making it easier to recruit new employees, especially when they are familiar with the challenges of consumer-facing retail environments.

Optimizing Retail Operations with Scalable, Integrated Touchpoints
There are also several ways to make every day easier for the retailer. One of the biggest challenges for c-stores is the limited space, with many having only a single checkout system. If that system goes down, revenue is lost immediately. With our DN AllConnect Services^SM for Retail, we ensure maximum system availability through predictive, proactive, and preventive services, so retailers can avoid downtime and missed revenue opportunities. Additionally, Vynamic^® Retail Platform, our enterprise-ready platform for retailers, offers offline capabilities, ensuring that stores can continue operations even when connectivity issues arise. This approach helps c-Store retailers maintain seamless operations and secure every potential sale, no matter the circumstances. Furthermore, this platform can reduce the complexity of individual adoptions per channel and touchpoint by creating one scalable user interface for all kinds of devices. The new multi-touchpoint integration solution makes it easier for retailers to centrally manage user interfaces for a growing number of consumer-facing touchpoints.

F+C environments won’t become less complex, and it is often easier to collaborate with a technology partner when looking for an easy way to implement modern, consumer-oriented F+C environments. Just contact us. That’s easy.


Originally published in Mobility Plaza