Here's even more from our interview with Colin Mahoney, the general manager of Shorty's Garden & Home in Vancouver, Wash. Mahoney tells us about a microscopic upgrade and also what the team at Shorty's has done to improve its customer-reward program.

Q: You've recently replaced the microscopes at your help desk with new ones. Can you tell us what they do?

Mahoney: The centerpiece at both of our stores is our help & advice desk. It’s usually one of the first things you see when you walk in. And this year we got rid of the old standard microscopes and we went to a digital Celestron microscope, which is a handheld microscope with a USB port and a cable, and it has a light and a camera. We can actually view the image we’re looking at on the screen of our help desk’s computer.

They can use this microscope to snap images and show the customer on the screen exactly what’s affecting the plant. As far as an educational tool, it’s been great. We can email the image back to the customer, to our other location and even the Extension Service we work with if we can’t figure it out. It’s a pretty amazing tool.

This also brings into play all the PDAs our managers have. They can receive these images on their phone no matter where they are.

In the store as well, if they’re walking down an aisle and they’ve got a customer that wants to know more about a plant and maybe that manager knows someone at our other location knows a whole lot more about it, they can snap a picture with their phone and text message it over. We making a big push to use and do those kinds of things and to educate our staff to be efficient.
 

Q: Shorty's Bucks just went paperless. How has this helped to improve your rewards program?

Mahoney: We’re kind of in the middle of a transition for ours. What we used to do was the standard Shorrty’s Bucks. One dollar back for every $10 you spend. It was all paper. One thing we didn’t like is that we weren’t getting customer information – no names, addresses or emails.

This year, we decided at the first of the year to use the loyalty program feature in our Point-Of-Sale software. We went paperless and pitched it as an easy-to-use program. Other than that we kept it the same, because people love it and we didn’t want to frustrate anybody.

The first move was to get it into the computer and then sophisticate it from there. The firs half of this year, we’ve been getting all of our customers into the computer using a sign-up sheet. Then we can store their Shorty’s Bucks automatically, this way they don’t have to hang onto anything and they don’t have to worry about losing them or forgetting them in July. The program is now called Shorty’s Rewards and they get one point for every $10 they spend, and the rewards are still redeemable in July.

And now that we have their addresses and email addresses, we can send out enewsletters and reward reminders to them. We can advertise our events to them. Our email count has gone up 250 percent from last year in just about three months and this has allowed us to use a much cheaper marketing method. It’s also allowed us to target our customers based on their purchases.