Sorry, Self-Service: Customers Want to be Served

"Late Night" host Jimmy Fallon perhaps says it best: "If you asked me which humans would finally beat the machines, I would not have guessed supermarket cashiers."

While Fallon’s comedic stereotyping might not be universally-accurate, his point is clear—when one thinks speed, he typically does not think about the service provided in grocery store lines. And that notion makes the latest round of research on self-checkout lines all the more sad: customers overwhelmingly prefer cashier checkout.

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According to the Food Marketing Institute, only 16% of supermarket transactions were completed via self-checkout in 2010. That was down from 22% in 2007, a peak level for adoption of the technological alternative.

At this point, little unrelated to dissatisfaction with the technology can explain the poor adoption. Customers have had years to acclimate themselves to the technology. Tens of millions of them, in fact, are forced to use self-service daily when they purchase from online retailers.

And insofar as use of self-checkout has declined from its 2007 level, portraying "availability" as a bottleneck on self-service satisfaction levels is illogical; a significant chunk of those who had experienced the technology by 2007 are no longer interested in using it.

With research and customer feedback showing a clear preference for cashier-staffed checkout, supermarket chains have begun rolling back—or eliminating—their self-service offerings.

Chains like Big Y Foods and Albertsons are among those who have committed to removing self-checkout aisles from their stores. Having begun offering self-service as an alternative for customers who wanted a speedy, hassle-free checkout, when it became clear that the desired benefits were not being delivered and the desired customer adoption was not being achieved, the offering started to make a lot less sense.

For some, particularly those with simple, small purchases, self-checkout performs as advertised. But when asked to do things a bit more complex, its speed advantages over cashier checkout began to evaporate. Big Y found that confusion over coupons and payments produced delays in lines, while problems with the scanning, pricing and bagging process resulted in accidental (or intentional) theft. Anyone who has experienced self-checkout can add "accidental overcharges" to the list of errors as well.

Since a live clerk often needs to be called over to resolve the problems created by the system (or to explain issues related to sale prices and volume discounts) the checkout process could prove even more inefficient than cashier aisles. Armed with a dedicated staff member at the register, cashier aisles are inherently positioned to minimize or instantly alleviate some of the "scanning" problems inherent to finicky self-checkout computers.

In such cases, the cashier aisles, not the self-checkout aisles, provide the faster, more efficient service.

As can often be the case with alternatives to call center interactions, such as web self-service, efforts towards automated or computerized transactions sometimes lose sight of their key objective. Married to the notion that computers are faster than humans, these initiatives bank entirely on the fact that customers who want expedient, convenient transactions and support are going to choose self-service.

Studies like the aforementioned, however, confirm that efforts to improve the customer experience should be "mechanism-neutral," focusing on the "why" before the "how."

With flawed self-checkout systems, it appears supermarkets made the mistake of treating customer demand for efficiency as synonymous with customer demand for technology. While the two often go-hand-in-hand, it is not a certainty that a technological offering will yield the desired efficiency outcome. There are plenty of online FAQ, automation and self-service tools that take excessive amounts of time to produce resolutions less successful than what one would receive from a live call center rep.

In the supermarket, there will be a percentage of customers who always prefer receiving personal assistance from a cashier. But not everyone who failed to utilize self-checkout is one of those people. Many customers would gladly switch to a form of self-service or expedited checkout if it did as advertised—shortened the lines and sped up the checkout process.

Recognizing that customers’ vote of no-confidence in the current crop of self-checkout machines is not tantamount to disinterest in anything that changes the status quo checkout process, some chains are experimenting with new ideas for giving customers what they want—more efficient service.

Kroger, for instance, has begun testing two new concepts.

One, seizing on advice offered by Larry David in a sixth-season episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," calls for the formation of a single "metro style" line, rather than a series of lines created at each aisle. Designed for customers with smaller purchases, the line feeds into multiple cashier-aisles, assuring the most fairly- and efficiently-flowing queue. No one gets disproportionately "stuck" behind a customer with a complicated transaction, and all receive the fastest service the store can offer.

Another, "scan, bag and go," lets customers scan and bag items as they shop. Though not immune from some of the challenges facing traditional self-checkout scanners, this system at least assures that such problems will not cause tie-ups and longer lines at the register.