Why Choose a Micro-Market over a Pantry for Your Office

Are the coffee runs in your office taking longer than usual and eating into your team’s productive work hours?

Is finding and refilling tea bags, sugar, coffee and snacks on the pantry shelves a constant nightmare for your team?

Then it is time your office floor or complex got itself a micro market powered by the smart vending solutions from Vendekin Technologies, known for creating the best vending machine software in India and worldwide. Here’s how a micro market can help your office.

What Is a Micro market?

A micro market is a closely condensed convenience store consisting of 2 or more vending machines selling various products through unmanned, unattended retail. It utilises automated self-checkout technology, often combined with cashless methods of payment.

But, can a micro market benefit your workplace? Here are five benefits of incorporating a micro-market into your office space.

Transform Your Break Room

Upgrading to a micro-market powered by the best vending machine software from India upgrades your break room. Instead of a room with beat-up coffee machines and shelves of expired snacks, a break room with smart vending machines with neat rows filled with snacks, beverages and even office supplies makes for a much more modern and convenient break room. It creates an overall improved office experience and subliminally communicates to the office staff that they are valued and their needs matter. Instead of each one going off on their own, often you will find teams gathered around these new-age vending machines or micromarkets during breaks, which overall helps build relationships and morale.

What does this mean for the company? Higher employee morale usually means an overall happier place to work. Additionally, adding a micro-market may also give your business’ reputation a boost as a workplace. Company perks, such as better break rooms and snacks, are highly valued and can even become a talking point helping draw and retain talent.

Greater Office Productivity

Another reason why using a micro-market makes sense for today’s businesses is that it is an easy way to boost your workplace productivity.

Office staff leaving the office for long lunches and coffee breaks can cost a company useful work hours. A micro-market powered by the touchless, cashless vending machine technology from India, can save your team a lot of time. Snacking and even lunch options are available, allowing your staff to easily shop for satiating and nutritious food without stepping out of the office. All in all, having an engaging break room in your office can help your staff save time and stay focused during the day.

More Convenient than Old-school Vending

Micro-markets via smart vending, have done away with hassles of traditional vending machine technology in India or worldwide. It is uncommon now to see users standing around a vending machine fumbling for coins and notes. Vending machine dispensation technology too has upscaled, and it is unusual to see products get jammed in now.

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In Conversation: Apoorv Nene on Customer Success at Vendekin

In this month’s edition of our In conversation… series, we got chatting with someone whose team works hard and smart to ensure Vendekin’s customers – new and existing vending operators (NVOs & EVOs) and brands – achieve business success as they become a part of the instant commerce revolution with smart vending provided by Vendekin’s best in industry cashless vending solutions in India. Vendekin Technologies is known for spearheading VCommerce or vending commerce and unattended retail through a patented touchless and cashless technology complemented by a comprehensive analytics and aggregation portal vNetra.

In this riveting conversation, Apoorv Nene, head of Customer Success at Vendekin Technologies shares his experiences of leading the department and the most common and unusual challenges his teams tackle in providing a delightful experience with smart vending machine solutions to entrepreneurs in India.

Leading Customer Success at Vendekin

Apoorv is an Industrial Engineer from the University of Illinois Chicago and an executive alumnus of IIM Kozhikode. Armed with the experience spent working with American Axle & Manufacturing as a quality & industrial engineer and ZOLLER India & South East Asia as a technical sales manager in the United States and India respectively, Apoorv joined Vendekin Technologies in June 2021, just as the country was coming out of the pandemic-induced lockdowns and getting used to the contactless approach to daily life.

What exactly does Customer Success mean at Vendekin?

According to Apoorv, it’s simple. When a customer feels valued, feels that his/her decision to venture into this industry with Vendekin has begun showing results that are visible and tangible, that there is Customer Success.

Apoorv and his team of 15, which also includes a part of the operations team, work with two kinds of people every day. One, the ‘Customers’ consisting of vending machine operators, entrepreneurs and brands. This can range from experienced players to new entrants, both to whom Vendekin provides vending machine solutions in the form of smart vending machines, intelligent RetroBox and the SaaS software powering them. The second type of folks his team interacts with are the ‘Consumers’, those making transactions and purchases using Vendekin-powered smart vending machines. These consumers reach out to Vendekin using the in-app messenger with suggestions, complaints, or questions. Apoorv’s team steps in here by providing solutions directly or bringing the operator into the loop to ensure the issue is resolved in the shortest possible time. This way it’s a double win for the end-consumer as there is always another level of redressal of their complaints and concerns.

How does the Customer Success team help brands and new entrepreneurs?

The customer success teams are by the customer’s side right from the time they are on-boarded with Vendekin. The teams work in tandem with the marketing team in educating the customer about how to extract maximum benefit out of their smart vending machines by making optimum usage of the analytics platform - vNetra. These smart vending machine solutions provided include technical troubleshooting, marketing assistance, promotional strategy planning, and customisations of the vending machines and the software as per the client’s business requirements. The operations team in particular plays a vital role in ensuring that installation and commissioning of vending machines is carried out with utmost diligence. A thorough software and machine operation training is provided to the customers to ensure a good consumer experience.

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Retrobox - The booster shot of smart tech for traditional vending machines

Traditional Vending Machines - Just a simple box with snacks

So what comes to mind when someone says vending machine? A large glass and metal box placed conveniently in a corner, with some brightly packaged snacks, plastic beverage bottles. Or maybe the vending machines that you are thinking of are those table top machines, commonly found dispensing tea or coffee in office pantries. Or perhaps you are thinking of the ticket dispensing machines at metro stations. While the products being dispensed may vary, all the vending machines above usually accept currency notes, coins and cards and allow for punching in the product code through some buttons or a keypad.

All in all, a vending machine would seem to be a simple mechanical box with limited payment options to make a purchase using cash or sometimes a debit or credit card. These machines also have a high chance of a lost sale if the customer walks away if he/she doesn't have the exact amount of cash on them, or if their card fails to swipe or be detected for some reason or if they do not wish to swipe/tap their card multiple times to get multiple products.

With the Retrobox, Vendekin Technologies is bringing transformation into the vending machine business, making these older, simpler and clunkier vending machines smarter with a touchless, ‘shopping cart’, mobile purchase experience with multiple digital payment options.

So what is Retrobox?

Retrobox is a palm-sized plug-and-play device created for vending machines by Vendekin Technologies, used by smart vending machines suppliers in India, US, Europe, UAE and other countries. It is compatible with all Multi Drop Bus (MDB) versions and can be set up in less than 10 minutes. The Retrobox acts as an interactive controller device, managing the execution activities through customers’ mobile phones. It can be placed inside the old machines by simply connecting the MDB, DEX and Keypad cables of the machine, without having to make any cosmetic changes on the exterior. The machine looks the same but operates more smartly and efficiently.

What made managing the older vending machines cumbersome?

Missing Innovation

• Older machines need a GSM telemetry device to transfer data. With the 3G sun setting upon 2022, these devices have to be upgraded to run on 4G and 5G networks.
• There are usually only two payment options available in older vending machines, either cash and card.

Poor Consumer Experience

• These machines dispensed only one product at a time.
• Older machines require currency change management to accept physical currency
• Contactless cards have limitations in terms of number of swipes/taps in a day

Operational Inefficiency

• Running and maintaining cash equipment comes at a high cost.
• Card readers, cash acceptors and telemeters are expensive to set up and maintain.
• Existing back office operation management softwares do not provide in-depth data analysis for the entire operation.

Today, if vending machines and kiosks do not support all forms of mobile cashless payments, the operators could be missing out on an extra 20% in sales. That’s where Vendekin’s Retrobox provides the booster shot of smart tech, providing a one stop solution to the operators.

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A New Way to Retail with Vending Commerce

We are living in unprecedented times. Since the pandemic, things are constantly changing and evolving as we learn a little more about the virus and its implications. The demand for flexibility is at an all-time high. Whether it is the flexibility of being able to work away from a professional workplace or getting contactless home-deliveries for everything from packaged retail products to even fresh food, essential medicines and supplies. As we respond to the pandemic by adapting our lifestyle to this new normal of reduced contact or contact-less, some older innovations too are being adapted and modified to suit this new lifestyle.

One such older innovation is the vending machine. Vending machines are turning out to become an effective means of touchless distribution of products right where they are needed and when they are needed. With IoT and rapid digitization, these interactions with vending machines are becoming smarter and digital as well.

Unlike countries like Japan or the U.S., vending machines have not been very common or large portion of India’s retail pie, however this is changing with Indian businesses and customers becoming increasingly more comfortable with digital platforms and payments. Along with traditional kirana stores, malls, and e-commerce, unmanned retail through vending, is poised to become an indispensable part of distribution and sales.

Another factor accelerating the rise of unmanned retail are players like Vendekin Technologies and their touchless digital vending technology which is making vending machines in India more ubiquitous and digital.

What started as a solution-provider for providing a mobile payment system for the often-overlooked sanitary napkin vending machines, has quickly transformed into a global pioneer for unattended retail technology solutions, with multiple patents globally. Today, Vendekin Technolgies is the leading name in providing smart vending solutions to businesses in India and internationally. Apart from smart vending solutions for Fast-moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) brands, and helping existing vending operators (EVOs) upgrade to digital, Vendekin also provides the right ecosystem for new vending operators (NVOs) to flourish in a fast-growing market.

Vending Commerce

The vending business, can seem quite intimidating with a high learning curve for the average entrepreneur. Apart from the lack of domain expertise and seemingly high capital investment required to start a vending business, another problem is the maximum retail price or MRP of a product. Profit margins for vending entrepreneurs can often get squeezed when they are negotiating prices with bigger FMCG players. Identifying all these problems, Vendekin launched Vending Commerce, or VCommerce to make vending machine and unmanned retail in India smarter for customers and simpler for those looking to set up a vending business. Right from helping source the hardware to providing branded software solutions and mobile app to make the vending machines smarter, to negotiating better margins.

In this digital march of the Indian retail sector, VCommerce is poised to become an important and eventually indispensable part of a brand’s marketing, branding and distribution strategy.

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