Ensuring passengers the best Duty Free purchasing experience
Background
With reports year on year of air passenger numbers hitting record highs, World Duty Free were conscious of the requirement to streamline customer service at their flagship stores in two of the world’s busiest airports handling a combined total of over 107 million passengers in 2013.
As one of the world’s leading travel retailers and UK market leader, operating over 490 stores in 19 countries, World Duty Free prides itself on its understanding of passengers’ needs. Its continued commitment to deliver the best consumer experience and maximise income per passenger drove the need to find an effective, new retail solution.
It was essential to cut queuing times, during peak periods especially, to ensure that passengers were able to make duty free purchases at the airport.
World Duty Free awarded the contract to ECR to implement their flexible mobile PoS solution into its leading stores at London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports in 2012.
ECR’s mPoS solution is now enabling World Duty Free to provide a more personalised assisted sales service to their customers and to greatly reduce check-out queues during peak times. These measures result in increased sales and higher levels of customer satisfaction.
The mobile travel retail solution is optimised for the unique airport duty free retail environment, is fully PCI & EMV compliant and handles multiple payment options. It also issues receipts and manages the entire stock process. The fully mobile units can be used throughout the store enabling staff to advise, sell and take payments immediately, removing the need to queue at a fixed till point and easing queues at peak times.
ECR’s solutions have been extensively used across the globe in the transport, ticketing, hospitality, banking and retail sectors.
Mobile Travel Retail Strategy
ECR’s mPoS product is part of a suite of travel mobility solutions comprising the latest in mobile device technology, specialist mobile retail point of sale software and configurable cloud based mobile retail management software.
The system brings together industry-leading on-board payment software and cutting edge mobile technology.
All of ECR’s mobile solutions are fully PCI compliant to allow both online and offline Chip and PIN transactions and can include an integral, fast, silent thermal printer to issue receipts and a bar code scanner for quick and accurate product entry.
ECR has developed specific mobile travel retail applications built around this core mobile retail platform. They include the highly successful RailPoS™ for the rail on-board retail industry (as used by rail companies such as East Coast) and AirPoS™ for the inflight retail sector.
Results
ECR’s mPoS mobile retail solution has been helping World Duty Free to enhance its customer experience whilst maximising sales for over two years.
The purchase of this mobile solution from ECR was directly driven by a desire to dramatically improve the consumer experience by offering a more customer-centric mobile solution, which streamlines the sales process whilst cutting queuing times.
ECR’s mPoS solution not only offers an added layer of payment flexibility but also intelligently manages stock-levels, allowing for quick replenishment of popular products and better sales forecasting, helping to maximise revenue.
The vast array of over 17,000 products that World Duty Free stocks meant that it needed a fully autonomous solution, capable of taking payments and instantly issuing receipts to validate transactions. This system not only facilitates this, but it also manages the entire stock control process.
Sales staff have also responded very enthusiastically to the new solution. They can now operate far more efficiently and provide an enviable level of customer service to every customer.
