Do you know all of the ways you can make use of telemetry solutions for your vending business? You’ve likely heard about telemetry being used for technical alerts, stock management, and sales tracking, but there are plenty of other tools and data that telemetry solutions can provide to help you solve problems and boost your business growth.
In the case of Vendon, our telemetry solutions do the heavy lifting for you – data from your machines is collected in a single platform, structured, categorized, and even analyzed. Thus, it becomes very easy to adjust your business processes to increase sales and revenue. Plus, you can go even deeper and invest in further research to catch patterns that are not apparent immediately.
In this article, we have identified 5 common challenges that vending operators face – read on for some insights on how telemetry data can be interpreted in order to address these issues and increase sales at the same time.
Key Challenges Faced by Vending Machine Businesses
Evaluating the ROI of marketing activities
Evaluation of the ROI of marketing activities at a given location can be a struggle. Does a promotional poster in the vicinity of the coffee or vending machine help boost sales? Does an online promotion have any effect on sales performance? What about the right physical location of the machine? Should it be placed near the entrance or the till?
➡️ Solution: Detailed reports and analytics.
Our clients use Vendon to answer all kinds of questions, as data is readily available to them, which ensures that money is spent on activities with high ROI and machines are placed in locations that yield the highest results. Customers can analyze product, machine, and location performance to see the effect of promotions on sales.
In the Vendon Cloud software, you can use Sales Overview to see sales by day for each machine or try the Report Generator tool to group data by location and get customized reports.
Avoiding price changes due to concerns about sales performance
Price changes are always a sensitive topic with customers, but the impact of a lower or higher price is not always clearly apparent, hence finding the optimal pricing model can be difficult.
➡️ Solution: Inventory Report & Investigating price sensitivity.
Vendon Telemetry solutions give you access to different kinds of reports, including the Inventory Report which allows you to check on the prices of each product in all of the machines you are managing. According to your choice of pricing strategy, you can price one item identically across all machines, or bump up the price in the most popular locations.
To make any changes, just click on the machine name and proceed to a price change there. Because of this, Vendon also makes it easy to check the price sensitivity at a given location. All sales data is readily available, and prices can be changed remotely, so operators get an immediate response on whether price changes impact sales performance.
Through such experiments, one of our clients discovered that a 20% increase in price does not affect sales volumes at all.
Inefficient routes and hectic refills
It’s not uncommon for vending machine operators to plan routes by pure luck, however, it can be very inefficient, leading to unnecessarily spent time and money. Often the decision to refill a machine is made by the owner or the customer without having any real-time information about the stock levels. Additionally, having no pick-lists for refills available can result in rushed and unorganized refillments.
➡️ Solution: Route Planning & Pick-lists.
A pick-list is made according to the stock information available in Vendon Cloud. Products are then packed in boxes in the warehouse by filling a separate box for each vending machine according to the pick-list. Afterward, the products are delivered to the vending machine locations according to the dynamic route planning tool. Vendon Telemetry solutions make this process easy as you can see the exact products in the quantities that are needed for the refillments. It’s satisfying to always have precisely filled vending machines, while also saving time and money.
Some products are always sold out while others sell slowly
Without telemetry, filling the machine with top-selling products takes a lot of guesswork and places a huge responsibility on the refiller to inform the product team that some items are constantly sold out while some stay unsold for extended periods of time.
➡️ Solution: Product shelf analysis.
Vendon Cloud has a product shelf analysis section that provides recommendations based on historical sales data – that way, the machine is emptied out more evenly, as the top-selling products are stocked in larger quantities, which leads to an increase in turnover and fewer refill visits. For one of our clients, machines reached twice the industry average when they began analyzing product sales.
Downtime causing loss of sales
Without IoT and Telemetry, you have next to no information about the machine’s technical status, until the next weekly visit or when you get a call from customers. Plus, technicians have to bring a lot of unnecessary tools when visiting machines for repair, as they don’t know the exact problem beforehand. It is a universally acknowledged truth that downtime equals lost sales and lost revenue. Thus, it is vital that operators pay attention to issues that render the machine unable to perform and take action immediately.
➡️ Solution: Downtime Report.
With Vendon’s Downtime Report, you can quickly identify machines that require your attention instead of waiting to receive a call from an unhappy customer. Always keeping your machines in working condition can help you increase sales and maximize revenue. With Vendon, you can also receive timely alerts about technical issues in your e-mail or Vendon Mobile App, which lets you react quickly and be more efficient.
Conclusion
It can be difficult to figure out what exactly is causing you to lose sales or slowing down your business growth. This is why Telemetry solutions are useful as they provide you with advanced real-time data about all your machines and let you make the right decisions for your business. Vendon Telemetry solutions let you observe consumption trends, track sales, investigate price sensitivity, and use various handy tools to increase your sales and make your business more efficient.
Start optimizing your coffee business today and boost your revenue – get in touch with us at grow@vendon.net or your distributeur local.
