The Ideal Solution for Self-Service Payment Stations

“There has been no need to provide customers with additional guidance. It is an intuitive system."

Background

On the university campus in Utrecht, you will find the 'Think Different - Spar University' supermarket, a version of Spar’s city stores which have been specially developed for university campuses.

The Spar University concept focuses on students with an on-the-go food mission. "We have a passion for students and the fast-paced world around them," says Erwin Binneveld, Director New Customers at Spar University. The store is aimed at students who want to buy something in hurry at peak times during the breaks between lectures and seminars.

 

Challenge
As an innovative retailer, Spar University is constantly looking for improvements and developments. They decided to fully equip all stores with self-service checkouts.

However, many systems were only suitable for card payments and with many foreign students at the university, cash still plays an important role. In many other countries cash is used more frequently and not every foreign student has a debit or credit card, so there was a need to offer cash payments.

So Spar University looked for an automated way to integrate cash payments into their self-checkout set-up.

Solution

The student supermarket chose Gunnebo SafePay, largely because it is a completely closed cash management process. This means is no way to get access to money during the cash cycle, which increases security, eliminates shrinkage and removes cash differences. Since staff no longer need to count cash, significant time savings are made.

The cash flow control of the store has improved and the entire process is secure, which is valuable for a location that can welcome an average of 4,000–5,000 customers a day.

Erwin Binneveld:

"Gunnebo's SafePay fits perfectly within the concept of full automation and as part of the self-service checkouts. We see that the system is easy for our customers to use – they pay themselves without a cashier needing to step in or monitor the process."

The feedback from the team and customers regarding the SafePay solution is positive. It is a stable, reliable system that Spar University is satisfied with. There has been no need to provide customers with guidance on how to use the payment stations. "It's an intuitive system" is the feedback from store staff.