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Nobody likes waiting in line; the faster you can drive traffic through your forecourt, the greater chance you have of attracting more customers. If you do it right, this can also increase your sales instore and improve repeat customer loyalty. While the first step is having a high-res screen on your Outdoor Payment Terminal (OPT), the key to success is in the payment workflows on your pumps.
It may seem obvious but there are so many workflows we come across that confuse even our most savvy industry user – let alone the public at large. If it’s available, clear instruction should be given for using contactless and/or chip card payment as well. We thought it might be worth taking some time to put together some tips to improve workflow basics.
1. Receipts: print or not to print
Give your customer the choice of printing a receipt (or not) – either right at the start of the transaction (“pay with receipt” or “pay no receipt”) or straight after showing them the transaction details. In many cases the answer will be ‘no’, saving not just time but the paper it takes to print a receipt as well. The longer you can avoid changing out the printer roll the better and if you can keep your receipts as short as possible, you delay that even further.
2. Size (and color) matters
When you are starting to design your workflow you need to consider the full range of people likely to use your payment terminal. Not all of them will have 20:20 vision, wear their glasses to fill a tank or be standing right up to the screen. Some of them will be color blind. Others won’t be native speakers of the language you work in. This means you need to think about:
- Using clear, large, fonts to make reading text easy when you’re standing three feet or more from the screen
- Use high contrast colors and avoid those in the color-blindness spectrum
- Keep your language simple and direct; don’t provide any unnecessary options
- Having Outdoor Payment Terminals with high resolution screens that are well lit
- Have clear correlation between screen prompts and the soft keys they relate to; use arrows and other simple graphic to reinforce your instructions.
3. Make it logical for how they want to pay
You can safely assume most of your customers will be in a hurry. Getting to ‘pay’ as fast as possible is going to be a great outcome for them and for you. But not all customers are going to want to pay in the same way. You should aim to create flexible workflows which are just as logical for someone who wants to pay with cash as by card or mobile phone.
To ensure customers paying by cash can fill and get inside as fast as possible, give this option upfront and use screen prompts to encourage them to ‘park and pay’ to free a fueling space.
Enable loyalty cards to be scanned at any point in the transaction that way forgotten cards can be retrieved from bags and cars while the tank is being filled.
Think about running different flows on your truck stop screens; these guys will expect your work flows to run the same as the several other hundred times they’ve stopped. Keep it simple and remove any unnecessary steps.
Before you commit your workflows to your OPT screens, test, test and test again. Find some friendly customers and see how they navigate their way through the options. If you have two options, then test them both and see which screen instruction is more intuitive and gets the result you want.
One of the great things about being able to build screens on an open platform is you have lots of scope as to how and by whom, the prompts are created. Plus, if they’re cloud hosted, which comes standard with Invenco OPTs, they can be easily managed, changed and updated across your site(s).
This is a really important part of getting more vehicles through your forecourt – take the time to think it through and get the full benefit from the screen you have. If you are interested in more workflow tips and how to extract value from screens on your pumps - visit our blog on improving customer engagement using workflows.