How to Improve Your Business via POS
The shop is only as good as its service is. Even the most wonderful assortment of goods, advantageous location and brilliant advertising won’t help you if employees are rude and unhelpful and checkout doesn’t work as it is supposed to. And one of the best ways to improve your service is to introduce a high-quality, convenient and modern POS.
Here are some ways your customer experience may be improved this way.
1. Integration
A cleverly organized POS allows you to achieve full integration of online and offline segments of your business. For example, Shopify offers an iPod-based POS that allows you to control your entire business using one and the same platform: your online and offline shops will have the same product inventory, the same account, you will be able to accept credit and debit card and immediately get unified analytics helping you to further optimize your business, and a wide choice of different apps for fine-tuning the entire thing. In other words, a correctly chosen POS eliminates a lot of boring and unproductive micromanagement, giving you an opportunity to concentrate your attention on bigger things.
2. Customer Retention
In recent years more and more marketers reroute their efforts from acquiring new customers to retaining old ones – statistics say that acquiring a new customer is 6-7 times costlier than keeping an old one. It is much easier to persuade an existing client to make a new purchase, for he already knows that your business can be trusted. So organize your POS in a way that motivates clients to come back to you. For example, create a client loyalty program and make sure it is as easy to claim rewards as possible. You won’t believe how many people are ready to spend an extra hundred to get this 5-dollar discount.
3. Highlighting Popular Products
Human is a social animal, which means that social proof plays an important role in deciding whether he is going to buy something or not. For good or bad, the majority is more likely to buy an item simply because a lot of other people buy it – which means that you should use your POS to highlight the hottest items on sale to make other clients want to buy them as well. Or you can make this or that item look especially desirable by mentioning that there are only 5 more in stock – statistics show that people are likely to buy even the things they don’t want if faced by a possibility of losing an opportunity to get them forever.
4. Present All Your Stores as an Organic Whole
Among other advantages of having a POS, if you don’t have a particular item in stock in a particular store, you should refer your client to another of your stores where he can buy it, especially if there is one in close vicinity. Or, in case you own just one shop, you should at least give your client an opportunity to seamlessly place an order in your online shop so that he is less tempted to try his luck somewhere else.
5. Make Clients Feel Special
When clients feel that you treat them as individuals and not as insignificant and faceless moneybags, they are more likely to come back to you. With the help of POS you may track previous purchase info of a particular customer to tailor his shopping experience to his needs. For example, if he buys a lot of white shirts for a long period of time, you may give him a discount coupon for a white shirt and be sure that he will be attracted by it.
A lot of shops use POS without putting real thought into it; use it as your chance to acquire competitive advantage over them.
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