Every element of the National Convenience Store Advisory Group’s Fall Conference was designed to help retailers turn customers into fanatics about their brands.

How do you motivate your stores (and staff) to peak performance? How do you get to the next level of sales and profitability? The answer may lie in developing a closer connection to your customers—, attracting new ones and turning more of your existing ones into true fanatics about your brand.

These stronger customer connections could be the Holy Grail of convenience retailing. And customers —many of them, anyway— are anxious to have a more meaningful relationship with your stores and the employees they interact with there. That’s a key message contained in the results of a study recently completed by the National Convenience Store Advisory Group and conducted by branding specialists Coyne Beahm Shouse and market researchers Decision Analyst Inc. The study was featured in two general session presentations at the NCSAG Fall Conference and is also summarized elsewhere in this issue.

Other seminars tied into the “customer connection” theme, including one led by Mel Kleiman of Humetrics on “How to Hire for Attitude,” and a case study on Pal’s Sudden Service, a QSR chain that has used values-based hiring to help it achieve best-in-class performance in the restaurant segment. For more coverage of the fall conference, go to CSDecisions.com.