By Jay Kim, Managing Director BIXOLON Europe GmbH
As the busy holiday season approaches, retailers and restaurants are preparing for an influx of customers. With increased foot traffic comes the challenge of managing customer expectations, especially around the issue of long queues. The festive rush, while a positive opportunity for growth, can also lead to dissatisfaction if customers face prolonged wait times, whether in store or at restaurants.
One effective solution to streamline operations and enhance customer experience is the implementation of mobile receipt and label printers. These devices can play a pivotal role in managing queues, speeding up payments and providing real time pricing updates – all of which are key elements for improving efficiency and productivity during peak trading periods.
Enhancing Pricing Accuracy with Mobile Printers
Accurate and easily visible pricing of goods is essential in any retail environment, particularly during peak season when customers are making swift purchasing decisions. However, maintaining up to date pricing across shelves and products can be challenging. Additionally, with the EU Omnibus Directive mandating pricing transparency across the continent, the need for quick and accurate price updates has never been more critical.
Traditional methods of printing labels in a central location and manually distributing them across the store can slow down the process and impact operational efficiency. This is where mobile linerless label printers come in. These handheld devices allow staff to print updated price labels directly on the shop floor, ensuring timely and accurate information is provided to customers.
The use of linerless labels eliminates the waste and mess associated with traditional labels, which have a plastic backing. Linerless labels have no backing and can be cut to any length required, offering benefits for both customisability and sustainability too. This flexibility allows retailers to make rapid adjustments during seasonal markdowns or promotional periods, ensuring that products are correctly labelled in real time.
Accelerating Checkout and Reducing Queues
Long queues at checkout are a common source of frustration for customers during peak season trading periods. For retailers, the ability to process payments efficiently and reduce bottlenecks at traditional points of sale is essential for maintaining customer satisfaction and maximising sales.
Mobile receipt printers, when paired with mobile point-of-sale (POS) systems, provide a practical solution to this issue. By enabling shop assistants to process payments and print receipts from anywhere on the shop floor, these systems reduce the need for customers to queue at static checkout points. This is particularly useful in high-traffic areas such as fashion stores, supermarket stalls, and pop up stores during the festive season, where customers typically have smaller baskets. This reduces the frustrating situation of trying to checkout with a handful of goods, while being stuck behind another customer who has a full trolley, which many customers will have faced.
This approach helps to reduce wait times, and also enhances the overall experience for shoppers while retaining sales for retailers. Happy customers are more likely to come back, and reducing queues and making the process as pain free as possible promotes faster purchases and supports impulse purchases at the same time.
Streamlining Orders in the Food and Beverage Sector
For restaurants, cafes and food stalls, mobile linerless labeling and receipt printing offers significant operational advantages during busy peak season periods too. With the introduction of Natasha’s Law, which requires clear allergen labelling on Pre-Packed food for Direct Sale (PPDS), compliance is essential to meet regulatory requirements and ensure customer safety.
Mobile linerless printers are enabling this to take place effectively, offering restaurants and food outlets a solution that is able to produce the necessary labels effectively, with minimal disruption to operations. These printers also enhance overall service by enabling staff to produce labels on site, reducing time spent on administrative tasks and allowing a greater focus on customer interaction and service instead.
Conclusion
Given the challenges that retail and food service businesses face during peak season, the ability to reduce queues, ensure pricing accuracy, and remain compliant with industry legislation is essential. Mobile receipt and label printers offer a practical, efficient solution to these challenges, enabling businesses to streamline operations, enhance customer experience, and stay competitive during the busiest time of the year.
