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Great truckstop operators know that no shortcuts exist to retail success. The closest failsafe is to know your truckstop and then build a customer experience using what you know. The best way to do that is to know and engage your customers, crunch the numbers and use your data, and curate an experience.

Know and Engage Your Customers
Operators often report that truck drivers are different from the rest of us, but this is only as true as it is to say that we are all unique. However, as humans, we have common needs. Regardless of occupation, gender or socio-economic status, people all have the same basic needs: food, air, water and shelter. In our industry, this essentially converts to breaks, bathrooms, food and fuel. We have to remember that these four activi­ties create opportunities and it is an operator’s job to convert these op­portunities and individual visitors into paying customers.

When you know your custom­ers, you should be able to identify what they want and explain how you know what that is. The world is changing and assuming that your customer is a truck driver because you run a truckstop is not sufficient and also could create a missed op­portunity. You need to understand the different types of professional drivers and four-wheel customers. You need to know if they’re local, regional, long-haul or part of the traveling public.

For an operator to truly know what their customer wants, they should ask questions and observe behaviors. Understanding the cus­tomers’ needs starts with asking and listening. Wanda Sheffield of Mill­er’s Oil puts the principle of asking into practice by hosting a monthly dinner for a group of drivers she’s assembled to help steer her under­standing. Sheffield uses this group as both a sounding board for her ideas and a source of inspiration for improving the business because the drivers feel comfortable telling her what they want and need.

Asking is only half of the equa­tion. The other half entails observ­ing customer behavior to learn what customers are not saying or may not even realize.

Apple utilizes beacon technology that talks to the Apple Store app on a customer’s iPhone to track their path around the store and then aggregates the data to determine optimal prod­uct placement based on customer behavior. Apple’s usage of an experi­ential retail experience (see more be­low) fueled by its utilization of data is a large part of the retail success equation that allows them to average $5,546 in sales per square foot.

Truckstops can take a low-tech approach to do the same by look­ing at the floor to see which paths become the dirtiest the fastest and then place high-margin, impulse purchase items along those routes.

To get better data to understand their customers, operators can also create heat maps by tracking how many customers visit different cat­egories over time by observing in re­al-time or watching security camera footage and simply keeping a tally. Other low-tech observation options include looking at your shelves to see what products collect the most dust and either get rid of them or move them to low-traffic areas.

Crunch Numbers and Use Your Data
The most reliable observations come from crunching numbers paired with people watching. Truckstops maintain mountains of data often without realizing it. A point-of-sale system acts much like the brain of a truckstop by serving as a hub for all transactions and storing the details. Accessing that data even in its sim­plest form allows an operator to tell the truckstop’s story.

For example, a full parking lot paired with a low transaction count tells the opera­tor that he has a lot of visitors, but few of them are paying customers. A higher average ticket price during certain hours indicates a spendier consumer and the opportunity for time-sensitive specials.

Operators should also review which SKUs are selling and which are sitting and then act on that knowledge in their decision-mak­ing. Different brands typically mean different margins for the same prod­ucts. Data, such as customer counts and the average ticket, can tell you if you’re better off carrying a lower margin product that sells in greater volumes or a higher margin prod­uct requiring fewer turns. The same principle applies to product lines.

Sometimes pulling a product is the best solution. In 2016, Chick-Fil-A cut the spicy chicken biscuit from its national breakfast menu because it only accounted for 0.5 percent of sales and the chain needed to make room for new and more popular breakfast options. Resources are finite and operators need to carefully align how they utilize their resources with what their customers want and need.

Curate an Experience
Understanding the customer base prepares an operator to then engage the customer and curate an experi­ence to build brand loyalty. Even in today’s convenience economy, 86 percent of customers surveyed in the Annual Customer Experience Im­pact (CEI) Report, conducted online by Harris Interactive on behalf of RightNow, which was later acquired by Oracle, were willing to pay 25 percent more for a good experience.

Another study found that custom­ers want friendly faces that are happy to quickly help solve their problem in a comfortable place and in an ef­fective manner. In their effort to so­lidify brand loyalty, Starbuck’s strives to create an environment that meets that criteria and serve as a place that’s as familiar to customers as home and work. Despite having a more expensive product deemed inferior to Dunkin Donuts by Consumer Reports, Starbuck’s leads in loyalty; the coffee retailer held $1.2 billion on their proprietary prepaid loyalty cards in Q1 of 2016—more than some regional banks hold in deposits.

Creating a location that bolsters loyalty also requires convenience, according to The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg, and Starbuck’s delivers with mobile ordering. Star­buck’s customers now pre-order so they arrive at the coffee shop to find their latte waiting, and they can make their way into the comfy chair in the corner even faster.

Starbuck’s is not the only retailer embracing the convenience of mo­bile ordering. Apple allows custom­ers to not only place orders via their app for in-store pick-up, but also allows customers to pay for items they’ve discovered in the brick-and-mortar locations using self-check-out in the very same app.

Apple, like other disruptive retail­ers, utilizes data to redefine com­fortable experiences with the con­sumer’s imagination. Many retailers struggle to fight the showroom ef­fect in which consumers visit brick-and-mortar locations to try and ex­perience a product before buying it online at a lesser price—while others like Apple and Nespresso em­brace it. Tables with Apple products and concise, yet informative point-of-purchase displays give customers the opportunity to learn why the need to spend a premium and then try before they buy.

In Nespresso stores, consumers visit the espresso bar to try drinks before buying espresso pods and, more importantly, their proprietary high-end espresso machines. Nes­presso creates an environment that makes consumers feel comfortable and more likely to spend money by engaging them with sales associates doubling as friendly baristas.

In Tesla showrooms, consumers learn from interactive displays while waiting to climb in and imagine ev­ery day life in the driver’s seat of the $100,000+ vehicles they’re sitting in. Tesla puts the product front and cen­ter allowing consumers to interact and envision the product as a part of their life—a tenet in experiential retail.

Timberland recently deployed a new experiential brick-and-mortar concept focused on curating shoe collections in a minimalistic environ­ment. Timberland overhauls their retail space every six weeks to show­room a new collection of shoes with refreshed point-of-purchase displays to reflect the new collection’s theme. Timberland creates a minimalistic environment that allows customers to clear the day’s events from their mind to focus on understanding the unique value of the shoes before them while sampling a local craft brewer’s latest batch.

Getting lost in a retail experience is much easier when the environ­ment is clean, well-maintained and easy to navigate. Keep the location clean with a minimalistic approach to fixtures and gondolas to ensure it’s easy to walk around browsing. Keep categories together and everything stocked without using the front of house as storage. Make pricing visi­ble and clear to put customers at ease. Use POP to provide easily accessible information as appropriate to help customers make informed decisions.

Implementing these best practices together will improve the bottom line and improve brand loyalty. 

Photo: Stop Watch editor Amy Toner visited the Tesla showroom. 
Photo credit: Taryn Brice-Rowland/NATSO

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