WHAT TECH DO YOU NEED FOR THE FUTURE?

The Conexxus Roadmap looks at where c-store technology is heading—and when.

For the past several years, Conexxus, a technology organization that sets standards for the convenience industry, has looked at what the next seven to 10 years of convenience retail will look like—and what technology this industry’s retailers will need on the journey.

“The roadmap itself is a forward-thinking methodology that’s about the customer.

What does the consumer look like seven to 10 years out, and what available technologies do they have?

How are they going to leverage them?

And then how do we meet those consumer needs?” said Gray Taylor, executive director of Conexxus.

At the NACS Show last week, Taylor and other presenters drove through the roadmap, showcasing the importance that digital media and mobile commerce will have in convenience retail, the tech required for them, and the mandates and standards for adherence that retailers will need on their radar.

Digital Media and Retail Media Networks

Using digital media and retail media networks to engage with your customers and build loyalty will only continue to be more pivotal.

This means creating a consistent brand message and marketing strategy, offering customized promotions and deals, and targeting the consumer with engaging and meaningful offers.

With a retail media network, “Your end goal is to collect enough information from promotions so you can further refine and target those for your customers that you want to engage and bring into your store,” said Doug New, chief information officer at Nouria Energy Corp.

You can present offers and promotions to consumers in myriad ways and through a variety of channels, from TV advertising and social media to videos on the fuel pump.

That said, the panel agreed that the strategy will be most effective when you target the messaging to a consumer’s personal preferences.

Personalization in its highest form requires:

• A loyalty program to create and manage your promotions and collect data
• A CRM solution, and possibly a CDP
• Eventually, geofencing for a more sophisticated targeting offer

This is also one place where digital 8112 coupons will be essential.

“One of the great things about 8112 is that you can know who accepted your coupon, when they accepted it and where they actually redeemed it.

So you’re trying to build deeper consumer insights for your customers, and then you can more precisely target ads to them,” said New.

“Your data will show one customer likes fried chicken, so you can send him a coupon or deal when you know he’s in the area or during a time he often comes to your store.”

For all digital media that tracks customers and their behavior, retailers also need to take privacy into consideration to protect identities.

“You’ve got to be sensitive to the privacy nature with all of this, and the underlying technology you will need for that is tokenization of identity,” said New.

“We are going to see increased tokenization of our identity because we need to catch up with current web standards as companies take your data and have it all over databases,” added Taylor.

Mobile Commerce

The panelists speculated about a future in which vehicle dashboards could help with commerce and purchasing goods.

Imagine if you could ask your vehicle where the nearest spot to buy a pack of cigarettes is and it would route you to a c-store and offer you a coupon for your preferred brand.

Some car manufacturers and fuel retailers abroad have even implemented mobile payments from the dashboard at the pump.

A critical component of mobile commerce will be good SEO that allows digital assistants to find your store and know what products you offer.

“We need to make sure we have standards that allow us to have that deep connection with customers that enables them to find our products, or else we’re going to lose the SEO to the decision-making of digital assistants that don’t know about all of the products we have to offer,” said Ed Collupy, innovation facilitator at Conexxus.

Mandates

With these future innovations on the horizon, retailers need to stay aware of standards and mandates of compliance for the technologies they will be implementing, said Don Emery, senior manager of product at CHS Inc. (Cenex).

“As much as we want to try to progress and get innovative and do new things, we have mandates and standards that come into play that we need to work within,” he said.

Some of the standards Emery noted are:

Sunrise 2027 transition to 2D barcodes

PCI 4.0

EMV and chip cards coming to SNAP

Standards for Fleet cards 2.0

P2PE

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