Kyle Speidell
Co-founder and co-president
The Green Solution
Denver, CO
When recreational sales began in Colorado on January 1, 2014, we were faced with an issue that we were anticipating but had little control over: long lines and extended wait times for customers. As we expanded The Green Solution with new locations, wait times continued to hinder our customer experience. As a company, we were happy to have this level of business, but we didn’t want our wait times to frustrate customers to the point of shopping elsewhere.
As competition in the Denver metropolitan area increased, we knew that we needed to make a change before we lost customers. We invested a great amount of time and resources into our training program but continued to experience difficulties with crowd control and line management as the popularity of our products and recreational cannabis grew.
One factor causing our bottleneck was our one-on-one, concierge-style customer experience, which pairs a retail associate with each customer to provide an education about our various products. We were challenged to continue to offer this model while aiming to keep wait times under three minutes.
As our business grew, so did our need to address this issue. We recognized we could resolve our wait time issue through expanding our online services, but at the time, the technology didn’t exist. We set out to build our own proprietary technology, and in early 2015 we launched the first e-commerce cannabis service.
Customers now have the ability to log into their loyalty accounts online and view a current menu of products at any store, which updates inventory automatically in real time. Customers can then add items to their virtual cart, place the order and will receive a text when the order is ready for pick-up. Status checks may also be viewed at any time.
Our online ordering platform has dramatically decreased wait times during peak hours. As more customers have taken advantage of these offerings, customer satisfaction has notably increased throughout our now 17 locations statewide. As we’ve been able to gather more customer data and learn what times are busiest at specific locations, we’ve also bulked up staffing at our stores to make our shopping experience as seamless as possible.
We regularly evaluate our current practices and develop new initiatives to improve our customer experience. We have several developments in progress that will further enhance our customer experience. We look forward to sharing more about our new processes with our customers, soon!