Beyond Grocery: How Modern Grocery Stores Embrace New Products & Technologies

By Gary Crunkleton, EVP of Operations, Hilco Global‍

Unlike other retailers, modern grocery stores are a commodity and a necessity.

A grocery store’s top priority is meeting its customer’s immediate needs. New technology and shifting customer habits have changed the way today’s grocers meet those needs. For a grocery store to achieve a successful customer experience, customers need to be provided with an easy and amenable shopping experience.

For the modern grocery store to succeed, they must invest in a customer experience that is consistent, convenient, and seamless.

It starts with being unique.

Modern grocers face several challenges when it comes to providing a successful customer experience. Customer service can be exceptional, and product prices can be competitive, but it’s hard to differentiate one grocery chain from another. To be unique in today’s market, grocery stores must provide more than just traditional grocery products to consumers. This means seamlessly providing unique merchandise that complements existing grocery staples, along with exceptional and consistent customer support across all stores.

To be a modern grocer requires breaking into new, complementary product categories:

• Create an atmosphere and customer experience by applying consistent visual grocery merchandising to entice compulsory purchases of non-food products.
• Make sure your unique merchandise is correct for your market and is supported by the right pricing and targeted advertising.
• Apply emerging grocery technology to empower your staff to deliver a great shopping experience, optimize stock execution, and drive store profitability.

How to empower and engage your staff.

As in any retail establishment, the customer experience is directly related to how engaged and empowered your employees are. If a grocery store employee fails to execute in-store activities, the store will fail to provide a positive customer experience. Without consistent grocery store merchandising, the overall customer experience can become negative, which means losing customers, reducing key compulsory buys, and therefore reducing store profit and revenue.

Incentivize your store employees to achieve well-defined goals. To build a team of motivated employees you need to enable them to share in your vision. Provide them with the tools to collaborate and align on those objectives that will determine store-wide success. Implement easy-to-use technology that assists your grocers in streamlining store operations – such as inventory management, visual grocery merchandising, employee management, and stock replenishing.

Hilco Global’s ReStore for Retail platform can help you quickly adapt to the needs of your customers and therefore improve customer experiences. The platform provides real-time information to store employees, managers, and the home office, allowing everyone to see what’s always happening within every store.

As modern grocers branch out into new product spaces like apparel, furniture, and seasonals, ReStore for Retail delivers a platform to easily manage galleries, tasks, and surveys to ensure your staff is educated on how and where to position and deliver the new products.

District managers can monitor the execution of these new offerings in real-time for a consistent look and feel across each store under their supervision. ReStore for Retail enables store and district managers to provide immediate feedback through pictures and visual images on how each section in the grocery store should be set to optimize performance.

ReStore for Retail enables retailers and modern grocers the ability to provide acustomer experience that is consistent, convenient, personalized, and seamless.

About ReStore for Retail.
ReStore for Retail is an independent operating unit of Hilco Global, one of the world’s leading retail authorities. To learn more about ReStore for Retail’s tech-enabled solutions, please visit www.restoreforretail.com.