Souq Planet’s adoption of Zebra Technologies

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Customers Enjoy The Ease And Efficiency Of Self-scanning

ABOUT SOUQ PLANET

Emirates (UAE), opening its doors in 1968 under the name Abela. It now has five outlets in the UAE, with thousands of customers, and has been an enthusiastic adopter of digital innovation as a means of improving the customer experience. This has included rolling out smart shopper cards offering a lot of benefits to loyal customers.

When it opened its fourth Souq Planet in 2014, a store with a floor area of 2,000 square metres, NCC decided to offer a self-scanning service to holders of its smart shopper cards.

There are plans to expand Souq Planet outside the UAE.

Solution

The retailer engaged Business DNA, a Zebra Technologies’ partner, to implement a self- scanning system in its new Abu Dhabi store. Business DNA rolled out the Zebra MC18 personal shopper retail mobile computers using the Re-vision Omni-Channel Platform, which connects the scanners to Souq Planet’s backend systems. Shoppers can also download the Re-vision software onto their mobile phone.

Now when customers arrive at the store, they go to the location where the scanners are held, present their smart shopper card to a handheld scanner, then pick it up and place it in the cradle on their trolley.

Customers scan the barcodes of the items they want to buy by pressing a yellow button on the scanner. They can then pack their shopping immediately or, if they prefer, put it in the trolley so that staff can pack the items for them when they have finished.

When they have completed their shop, customers go to the self-scan cashier point and hand their scanner to the cashier, who will check the total value of the goods and ask for payment.

Challenge

Souq Planet’s priority is to make its customers’ experience as smooth and easy as possible. At busy times, customers can find themselves queuing to pay, and Souq Planet wanted to reduce checkout waiting times.

It decided to introduce self-scanning for customers in its new Abu Dhabi store. The scanners would need to be robust, reliable and easy-to-use. Souq Planet wanted the scanners to have a good battery life, an efficient barcode scanner and strong wireless connection to transfer data to its enterprise resource planning (ERP), point of sale (POS) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems

Results

The Zebra MC18 scanners have proved extremely reliable and robust. They have been extremely popular with customers, who adopted them quickly.

Shopping is much faster: shoppers no longer need to queue to pay, unload their shopping cart or pack it into bags when they have finished. Souq Planet has seen customers return more often to the store and buy more goods at each visit. Souq Planet now plans to roll out the self- scanning system to its other stores.

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