Abierto: Reimagining Customer Engagement

Petrol stations and convenience stores are the only brick-and-mortar retail outlets in the entire world that not only compete on price but advertise those prices on giant signs that rise high into the sky.

While stations may attract customers on fuel prices, they truly compete on the items sold inside the store, namely food. So, how does a retailer stand out in a sea of sameness? According to the expert communicators at Abierto, it is by having clear, concise, and well-executed messaging.

Founded in 2005, Abierto Networks began as a value-added reseller of credit card processing technologies that evolved the offer into digital couponing solutions and eventually digital signage. In those early days, the term “internet of things” was understood by few, but to Abierto, it was the dawn of a new era in unified content messaging. Today, Abierto has expanded into a comprehensive communications engagement and messaging solution for the global convenience industry.

Attracting and Enticing Customers

For retailers, getting and keeping customers will always be the goal and Abierto is committed to helping retailers step up to that challenge.

Rick Sales, CEO of Abierto, considers his team to be a true solution partner, working diligently with retailers to understand their brands, map their journeys and communicate with customers to ensure messages are shared concisely.

Abierto does not consider itself as a design company, an ad agency, or a store designer, but Abierto’s niche is to be brand-educated, brand-knowledgeable and brand-competent. As Rick says, Abierto is “in the business of engaging with retailers, understanding that, and helping them execute it right.”

Abierto’s own brand mantra? Eric Sales, Abierto’s Creative Director exclaims, “execute your vision! You are the retail expert. You have a vision for an engaging on-premise customer experience. We help you make it happen and keep it happening.”

Envisaging a digital journey for customers

When meeting with new customers for the first time, ideally, Abierto likes to be working with a retailer who; “views its customer base as a long-term investment and views its business foundation on communicating with its customers and providing the best possible consumer journey”, says Eric.

He continues; “those are the retailers we really want to work with and I think every brand in the c-store industry aspires to be that. To be honest, they all want to have this incredibly loyal customer base, and to achieve that they will need to commit to the long-term investment on signage, communication, back-end network, and staff training. All of these things require a lot of time, so having that long-term outlook for success is really what I look for when I’m talking to a new customer and knowing that this is going to be great.”

Abierto encourages new retail customers to envision a digital journey for their customers. The digital journey is a term that describes how the consumer buying experience is guided and influenced by digital messaging along the way to a purchase. The digital journey often starts offsite, but it is truly reinforced on premise. One big key is meeting expectations by providing consistent, integrated messaging along the way. The messages that get customers to the site, the ads at the forecourt that get them inside, and the content in the store that leads to a purchase all need to be consistent – one big journey. New customers want to find the brand experience they came looking for after experiencing off-premise advertising. Loyal consumers expect the “brand experience” they love, at every store and on every visit.

Eric and Rick both agree that getting the customer on that consistent digital journey requires a commitment from the retailer to invest in the technology that will serve their long-term objectives. While it may seem that printed paper signs and decals are more cost-efficient, there are several reasons that this is not true. Printed signage not only costs labor hours to install and later change the signs, but the bigger cost is if they’re outdated, if they’re advertising out-of-stock items, or if they’re simply wrong. Further, according to Rick, printed ads are mostly ignored after the first week. Additionally, staff does not have the flexibility to change print ads three times per day or rotate through several offerings. As Rick states, “print ads are static, boring and quickly irrelevant.”

Additionally, quality, digital signage looks sleek and clean and can be extremely enticing with high-resolution images. Digital signage is a tool that requires a messaging strategy with goals, and a vision of how the consumer might engage with the signage. But, to be truly successful, a comprehensive digital strategy requires a full investment in technology, content and people. Employee training on the technology is imperative as well as assigning an owner to the content to ensure a consistent, strong outcome.

Rutter’s, EG Retail America, and Sheetz

Pennsylvania-based Rutter’s is one successful partnership that Abierto is proud to share.

Rutter’s Vice President of Fuels, Advertising and Development, Chris Hartman, cited that Rutter’s wanted to communicate effectively to both customers and prospective employees. Hartman needed to get customers into the store, especially during the pandemic, and wanted to share that Rutter’s stores are clean, safe, fully stocked and with great food offerings. Additionally, in a highly-competitive labor market, Rutter’s was consistently raising wages to compete with other chains and wanted to attract quality workers.

Rutter’s turned to Abierto for their digital forecourt messaging to invest in OPEN.LED Digital Film Display which provides an “impossible to ignore” digital canvas on the store’s windows that can be clearly seen from the outside, especially from the forecourt.

Eric Sales speaks to the creative collaboration Abierto and Rutter’s have achieved that helped the store team develop new skills in “transparent LED content design” in order to frequently rotate messaging. Eric continues, “already, we’ve deployed at several Rutter’s locations and it’s been very successful. [Hartman] is seeing active results both anecdotally and is tracking some of the different metrics he’s using, and it’s turned into an awesome partnership.”

Another retailer that Abierto works closely with is EG America, the U.S. subsidiary of UK-based EG Group. In this case, Abierto has a full-service collaboration including project management, product qualification, special contract pricing and guaranteed supply of technology products.

Having grown through acquisition and organic store construction, EG Retail America has opted for integration of all banners and offerings into a single platform for scalability and centralized control utilizing Abierto’s OPEN.Platform concept which frees up EG’s creative teams to produce brand messaging and leave the content programming and scheduling to Abierto.

Lastly, one retailer wanted to communicate digitally beyond customers and worked with Abierto to develop an employee communication solution. Sheetz, based in Altoona, Pennsylvania, deployed an interactive kiosk as a key communications channel to drive employee engagement and promote the company’s brand culture.

Routinely recognized on ‘best place to work’ lists, Sheetz has next-level employee engagement tactics. As Eric details, “they are excellent at employee enablement for success, and they’re excellent at employee communication, letting them know how close they are to their bonuses, about cool and exciting new products and initiatives, and having this constant stream of communication. It creates this incredible in-store experience and the cornerstone of their success is that incredible employee communication.”

Abierto designed customized software that drives a uniquely-Sheetz experience for their associates which has won multiple awards for its visionary approach to employee engagement. The employee kiosk helps management directly communicate with the employee when they check in every morning so they can see what’s going on and if there are any special tasks that day. The manager interacts with it regularly to direct their team, increasing communication and transparency between corporate and the store associates.

Abierto’s unique products

Abierto’s OPEN. is a Saas Digital Engagement Solution. OPEN. was designed with the multi-site convenience store operator in mind because of their unique needs to manage brand messages across large and diverse geographies while delivering locally relevant offerings. Most importantly, OPEN. enables retailers to improve their customer experience by utilizing new technologies to communicate in a targeted, relevant and strategic fashion. OPEN. makes it easy to create a consistent look and feel across locations and store types.

OPEN. is an easy and scalable software for remotely managing the digital experience at every location and on every display. Customers are provided technology authorization, including fit and cost, and guaranteeing availability to provide for uninterrupted deployments.

Working with Abierto on the full scale provides retailers with digital content design and creation, hardware sourcing, device management, software customization, and installation. Additionally, tracking and verification is simplified with OPEN.’s reports and management tools. In essence, OPEN.Platform provides everything a retailer needs for success in their customer’s on-premise digital journey.

A really unique product that Abierto has deployed is the OPEN.LED digital film, used in multiple locations by Rutter’s and other retailers.

The OPEN.LED digital film graphics match digital screens and video walls as well as digital foodservice menu displays. The digital film is applied on the inside of the store window is 60% transparent from the inside out and is customizable to window size.

In addition to contributing to store aesthetics, OPEN.LED digital film allows store personnel to have unobstructed views of the forecourt area, which is an operational requirement for most retailers.

The optimal viewing distance is 25-150 feet, perfect for the distance from the pump to the store. A retailer can display animated videos, enticing customers to come inside to purchase food, drinks, and other products. In a 2020 blind consumer study, Abierto found that customers who viewed the OPEN.LED signage had a 100% recollection of the advertised products they saw on the screens and 2 out of 3 went inside the store to make an unplanned purchase.

A unique technical and market collaboration with LG Electronics allows Abierto to integrate LG’s Digital Film into Abierto’s OPEN.Platform, creating an exclusive, purpose-built solution for engaging consumers at C-Store Forecourt.

Market research firm Keynote Consulting conducted a study and found that OPEN.LED delivered a “compelling and impossible-to-ignore display that increased both promotion awareness and brand perception.”

When paired with other Abierto OPEN. content management programs and products, retailers can easily deploy consistent, strong messaging across multiple locations with the ability to rotate or change messaging when desired. Abierto developed the intricate content design for transparent LED alongside LG engineers and are rightfully proud of the functional, big, bold, and beautiful professional video and animation capabilities as seen at multiple U.S. retail sites.

Combined with the content communication experts at Abierto and LG, customers have the support they need for a successful installation and deployment.

U.S. truck stop juggernaut TravelCenters of America, recently acquired by BP, uses Abierto’s OPEN.Menu to manage and display its food and service offering throughout their facilities.

For TravelCenters of America, providing an amazing experience for all drivers, professional and consumer, requires a lot of on-premise messaging due to the breadth of their offering. Abierto’s key solution at TA, OPEN.MENU, features a centrally-managed, pricebook-integrated custom menu platform, and uses software automation to provide for multiple menu bundles, product offerings and pricing tiers, allowing the brand teams to evolve their food, tobacco, truck service and consumer products programs while supporting regional localization of offerings.

The platform even allows store foodservice managers to replace out-of-stock items with other menu items in real time. Finally, its evolutionary design supports the brand’s need to regularly update its message and offering without having to reinvent their menu content management system.   

Your convenience partner

Abierto sees convenience and fuel retailers as an “industry on the move.” And while the COVID-19 pandemic certainly accelerated retail technology adoption, Rick urges retailers not to slow down but continue to “keep that mentality of the customer as the most important part of their brand.” And that right there is why Abierto truly identifies as “Your Convenience Partner”.

To learn more about Abierto, visit their Innovator Page and visit their website at ab-net.us.