Moscow, 12 March 2024 – X5 Group is installing two million electronic price tags in 100 Perekrestoksupermarkets across the retail chain’s entire footprint. The electronic price tags will bring a new digital element to the customer journey, serving to improve the customer experience and boost the supermarket’s operational efficiency.
Electronic price tags help to free up a significant share of store employees’ working time to focus more on customer interactions and on other high-value tasks. Currently, employees of one Perekrestok store spend an average of about 12 hours of working time per day on replacing all paper price tags at the store and four hours on verifying them.
Information on electronic price tags is updated automatically without human intervention: the price and product details are changed online via an internal network to which all price tags are connected. The software for these electronic devices is integrated with the store’s existing IT architecture, enabling full data updates in just a few seconds.
Electronic analogues of paper price tags also eliminate the chance that the tags show incorrect prices, including for promotional items. This reduces financial losses that may stem from incorrectly displayed information while enhancing the store’s customer satisfaction index. This technology also helps to cut the cost of printing paper price tags.
Alexandr Chukhontsev, Director for Business Support and Performance at Perekrestok, commented:
“Digitising the customer experience and driving operational efficiency gains through automation and technologicalinnovation are strategic priorities for X5 Group and Perekrestok. Even a 10% reduction in the labour intensity of manually changing price tags will save 5% of net staff time, which can then be used more productively. We will invest this time into enhancing the customer experience through better front-line performance, in-store displays, and communications with customers. The rollout of this technology across 100 supermarkets – the largest such rollout in the industry – will help Perekrestok to deliver on this year’s ambitious financial targets.
A survey of our customers showed that poorly designed price tags are the number–one factor influencing their loyalty. If a price tag is poorly designed, the customer is likely to be dissatisfied with the store. A quarter of people will not even touch the product on the shelf unless it bears a price tag, or will ignore a product if it does not have a promo price on it. Electronic price tags will help us to avoid these situations.”
Digital price tags take the form of small displays featuring three coloured electronic inks: white, black (for standard price tags), and red (for promotions). The large font on the tags makes them accessible to visually impaired individuals. The electronic price tags being installed in X5’s supermarkets were developed by a Chinese vendor and stand out for their low energy consumption, which enables them to operate for a period of five years without requiring a battery change.