Morrisons, the fourth-largest supermarket in the UK, is making headway on a turnaround launched three years ago when former Tesco executive David Potts was named CEO. The 491-store chain had been struggling since the entry of discounters Aldi and Lidl into its market earlier in the decade.
Among the many improvements implemented under Potts’ watch has been Morrisons’ Checkout Promise: Extra checkouts will be opened if there is more than one person ahead of a customer in a queue. When Morrisons announced its promise in September 2016, it cited research showing that 70% of supermarket shoppers identified waiting in a checkout line as their top frustration in supermarkets, and 64% would leave a store rather than wait in a long queue.
To keep its Checkout Promise, Morrisons has leveraged the Irisys queue management system it rolled out chainwide in 2008. The system, which integrates data collected by people counters at the front door with data from sensors positioned over the checkouts, helped Morrisons gain recognition for having one of the shortest queue waiting times in the UK during 2016, according to The Grocer magazine in the UK.
Advertisement
To take its checkout service to the next level, Morrisons recently implemented an upgrade of Irisys’ Queue Intelligence analytics solution.
