The value of smart vending data for customer experience

We’re now truly in the midst of a vending revolution. Powered by Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity and pushed forward by new technologies in payment, security, and customer interaction, inert old machines are being transformed into smart devices that promise a range of new opportunities.

One of these opportunities comes from data.

Smart vending machines are now providing rich live information on customer purchases, popular products and locations, machine functionality, and a lot more besides. And this information is helping operators improve machine management and maintenance—and deliver added value to their customers.

While you can find out more about the benefits for operators here, in this article, we’re looking at how smart vending data can improve the customer vending experience. By improving that experience, vendors can keep customers returning and boost revenues.

Here, we’ll show you what smart vending data can do—and how CCV can help to give your vending offerings the edge.

Why Customer Experience Matters in Vending

Let’s start with the basics. Why does customer experience matter? Across all industries, and also in vending, it’s simply good for business.

If a customer’s experience of your brand is bad - across any touchpoint - many won’t return. In fact, a third of customers say a single bad experience would put them off using a brand again. Optimising that experience is a no-brainer for businesses serious about growth.

Customer experience doesn’t just affect how many customers return to your brand - but how much they spend too. According to a study in the Harvard Business Review, satisfied customers spend as much as 140% more.

Word of mouth matters more than ever. If a customer has a bad experience, they are likely to tell others. According to one academic study, 30% of customers will likely tell someone else. This will affect how your brand is received in the long run.

Increasingly, the customer experience matters even more than the product or price in brand recognition, according to a recent report. This will affect whether customers shop with you again.

What is “Smart” About Smart Vending?

Smart vending data helps you to deliver the experience your customers deserve.

But what exactly is smart vending?

Smart vending machines are IoT-powered devices - equipped with sensors, apps, and telemetric technologies - that offer important new dimensions to the vending experience. Think remote ordering, basket functionality, or payment with digital wallets, as well as richer information on stocked products.

Yet it’s data that really makes the difference. That means information on stock, purchasing habits, and payment and transaction trends, that operators can use to optimise customer experiences. For example, smart vending offers insight into:

These insights allow operators to better understand the behaviour of their customers at large. In turn, that helps them to optimise revenues.

But they have the power to transform the customer experience for the better too. How? Let’s take a look.

How Smart Vending Data Can Improve Your Customer Experience

Here are some of the opportunities smart vending data can unlock to help you deliver an optimal customer experience—and keep customers returning.

• Tailored marketing and product recommendations. Data-empowered vending lets you offer product suggestions to your customers based on the weather, the time of day, or past purchasing behaviours. Personalised vouchers and loyalty rewards are always used to entice customers back.
• Dynamic restocking. Smart machines can provide operators with real-time, remotely accessible data on stock health, through telemetric technologies. Combined with data on popular search terms, this can prevent disappointment, by ensuring the products that customers want are always available.
• Optimised payment. Today, customers want to pay with everything from cash to QR codes and digital wallets - and they are even embracing payment in advance. Data on payment trends - from preferred payment methods to transaction size and time - allows operators to better deliver value to customers by enabling easy payment in the way they want to pay.
• Remote troubleshooting. Even in vending, fast, effective, and informed customer service matters. Telemetry equipped machines allow operators to see live data on machine health, malfunctions, and maintenance issues - enabling responsive troubleshooting right when customers need it. Perhaps even more importantly, data on machine functionality across a range of different machines gives operators the information they need for preventative maintenance too. This way, smart vending operators can intervene before any malfunction has even occurred.
• Foot traffic count. Data on how many people pass the machine allows operators to understand the size of their potential audience. With this knowledge, they can better understand where to focus resources to boost efficiency and customer satisfaction.
• Opportunities for customer feedback. Smart vending machines allow operators to ask customers how satisfied they are. Equipped with this information, you get better insight into where improvement is needed - and deliver exactly what customers are demanding.

CCV: Helping You Make the Most of Vending Data

At CCV, we can help vending operators gain the deepest insights from their vending payment data - while keeping the integrity of customer data as our priority.

Here’s what we can offer to help.

Leading Payment in Vending

At CCV, we combine world-leading expertise with state-of-the-art payment technologies, to help you make the most of your smart vending data.

Get in touch with us to find out how we can help you understand your vending customers and their payment habits better - to support your delivery of a memorable, frictionless customer experience.

Contact our Vending Experts