At Crown Liquors, Customer Experience Remains a Competitive Advantage

A local chain with a loyal customer base, Crown Liquors offers a wide selection of wine, spirits, and beer at various locations in Indianapolis and the surrounding areas. The company was founded by childhood friends and Indianapolis locals Tony Kroot and David Symmes in 1989, shortly after their graduation from college. These founders were later joined by their friend Jon Sinder, and together the three men grew the chain, which currently consists of 19 stores.  

As Crown Liquors expanded into the suburbs and shifted focus to higher end products William Moore brought his expertise in the wine industry to the growing chain. Today, William plays an essential hybrid role for the business, working as a buyer and also supporting marketing efforts. He took some time out of his busy day to share insights about his changing industry with the Magstar team.  

What is your primary role at the company, and what does your typical day look like?  

William: My primary role is as a buyer, primarily of wine and spirits, but I also spend a great deal of my time working on marketing. My typical day involves meeting with distributor sales reps and supplier reps, tasting and assessing new products, going over orders for existing products, and managing purchase orders. I also work with our marketing team to come up with creative ways to promote both our stores and the products that we are featuring at any given time.  

How important has it been to differentiate yourself from other wine and spirit chains?  

William: It is extremely important to stand out in our very competitive business. We need as many tools at our disposal as possible to provide a pleasant and informed experience for our customers.  

Our world is filled with many types of operators – some with very fancy operations, some with typical liquor stores. You need to know your audience, know the neighborhood you operate in, and be an asset to that neighborhood. Staying ahead with technology and staffing is incredibly important, and we feel like we do it better than most. The goal is to offer inviting spaces for every type of customer that walks through our doors.  

Most importantly, we try to offer an elevated customer experience. It’s always an ongoing effort. Depending on the neighborhood, the expectations are different. 

In certain parts of our market, customer experience requires more bells and whistles, but even our most urban stores need the right technology and people to stand apart. An inviting, clean, safe atmosphere matters everywhere.  

Tell us a bit about your industry and your plans for your company  

We have 19 stores at present. We have no immediate plans to grow, though we’ll always look at the right opportunity as it comes along.  

Our industry is experiencing rapid change right now. There’s a huge push which feels global, but which is especially evident in the USA, towards reducing or eliminating alcohol from people’s lives. Then locally, we’re contending with increased competition from a national retailer. So, in the face of that increased competition, and changing customer habits, we feel we’re the perfect size for now, and we’re really focusing on our customer experience as a differentiator.  

What software were you using before Magstar to run your business?  

We were using a combination of the Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System for POS at the front end and a cloud based back-end program called OpSuite. OpSuite communicated and integrated with Microsoft RMS.   

Why did you decide to switch to Magstar Total Retail?  

Our previous software was no longer going to be supported, and the replacement didn’t meet our needs. The back end wasn’t working for us, and we weren’t satisfied with the experience of trialing it. Switching all our systems over to that solution didn’t appeal to the team.  

Instead, we wanted to find a more complete product that offered robust problem solving and a wide array of automated features that could save us time and make us more efficient.  

Were there any other goals you hoped to achieve or essential components you needed as part of this technology upgrade?  

We needed a solution more tailored to our operations. We really wanted to find something that gave us an edge, with more reporting, more analytics, and faster, more efficient programs that helped us do our jobs in a better way. That’s what we felt like we found when we found Magstar.  

In essence, we wanted to find a product that allowed as much automation as possible while also offering us analytical tools that would allow us to be nimble and proactive in areas like inventory control, warehouse operations, and data management.  

What are some of the ways that Magstar helps you address some of your challenges?  

There are fundamental capabilities to the Magstar solution that save us tons of time. For example, being able to export data into Excel to modify it, and auto-scheduling reports and program updates, like promotions.  

Also, many reports that exist in Magstar out of the box were similar or identical to some of the reports we had to have customized in our previous software packages. That was a really nice surprise – the canned, out of the box features of Magstar are things we spent years developing ourselves with customizations in our old software. Questions and problems and challenges that we had faced before Magstar were already addressed right out of the gate.   

In what ways do you feel that the Magstar software solution differentiates from Tier One software packages?  

Magstar offers a more complete product than anything else we’ve ever had or considered using. Though it would be appropriate for pretty much any retail environment, Magstar makes you feel as if their product was not only tailored to your industry, but to your business, unlike any other product we’ve ever used.  

Our business is fairly unique, and everything we had used previously seemed generic. It left you longing for something more tailored to your business. Magstar is a very thorough, well thought out product. The package liquor store industry is clearly understood by this team.  

How does Magstar help improve your communication with customers?  

By providing better reporting and analytics, Magstar helps us predict trends and  anticipate inventory needs and that helps us get our customers more of what they want. When you know what your customers want, it’s much easier to communicate with them.  

For example, when someone orders something on our website, the stock is accurate, and they’ll get what they want. Our employees can easily look at the computer and see accurately what’s in stock. Better data means better communication.  

How does Magstar help you do your job on a day-to-day basis?  

The speed and depth of the reporting that Magstar has made available to us allows us to get more work done in a shorter period of time and, just in general, allows us to use our time more effectively.  

With Magstar, I can spend time doing other things than sitting behind a computer. That contributes to providing a good customer experience and maintaining a good store.  

What’s your favorite capability of the software?  

In my role, I spend a substantial amount of time updating prices and descriptions and scheduling new prices to take effect. The ability to adjust products in Excel and then import massive numbers of changes and updates was a mind-blowing revelation when it first became available. That seamless Excel integration saves me dozens of hours a month, perhaps even a dozen hours a week.  

For a buyer, the majority of the day can be spent managing a product database of 30-40k items, and Magstar makes that so easy to do. The amount of time saved by that one feature for me, and others in our organization, is incredibly substantial. 

What’s your relationship with the people working at Magstar?  

Steven Greenwood has been a very valuable resource since we first met him, and our account team has always been outstanding. They are generally very quick to solve problems and always have great solutions in mind when things pop up that are a bit outside of the norm. Even after-hours the support levels are great, because the on-call person takes accountability for things 24/7. 

What are your next steps going forward?  

Our industry is in a state of extreme uncertainty at the moment. Whether it be from new customer behaviors or new competition, there is a lot swirling around us as we come out of the COVID-19 era.  

Coming into the pandemic, our position was pretty strong, with a solid local customer base and no new competitors, so there was no need to change the way we operated. When the pandemic hit, it was a terrible time for many businesses, but customer purchasing behavior was strong in our industry. The situation was incredibly challenging, with lots of pivots to how we ran operations, but lots of business.  

We did recognize that it wasn’t a normal marketplace, however. Coming out of COVID-19, sales came back to earth, new competitors arrived, and we had to work harder to maintain our customer relationships.  

What would you say to somebody on the fence about choosing Magstar?  

If you are a multi-unit retail operator and you want a POS/ERP software solution that offers both ease of use for your employees and robust analytical and reporting solutions, Magstar can’t be beaten. Plus, you will be shocked at all the problems that Magstar has addressed that, as retailers, we often think are so unique that no software company would be aware of, let alone have solutions for.  

The Magstar team get a very clear understanding of your business, and then figure out how to support it. Magstar handled our transition to their solution in a way that gave us a roadmap and laid out expectations and made it as easy as possible.  

In a single sentence, tell me the #1 benefit Magstar brings to your company.  

I believe Magstar’s greatest benefit to Crown Liquors is the fact that it is so well designed that, since making the switch to Magstar, we are spending less time working on our computers and more time making our stores the best they can be for our customers.  

What does your future look like with Magstar?  

The future looks great with Magstar. We’re starting to use the web-based interface, which increases access, and increases the number of devices and the number of hardware types you can use it on. We’ll explore some additional hardware solutions that Magstar can be used on, but regardless of the outcome of that process, the product is consistently good, and the new version will mean updates on a more regular cadence, which we are excited about.