An ePOS system can make a world of difference in your business.
From making your employees’ lives easier to providing you with invaluable insight into sales patterns, transitioning your outdated point of sale system to an electronic version can streamline many of your operations and save you a significant amount of effort.
One of ePOS software’s greatest benefits is also improving customer service. If you’re curious about how, here are a few ways an ePOS system will make your customers’ experiences that much better:
Expediting checkout
When you use a standard cash register at a brick-and-mortar location, it may take a moment for the card reader to verify the payment. If it’s down, then the customer has to resort to a different payment method, which means they might have to abandon their purchase because they don’t have enough cash on hand. To make matters worse, the slower a transaction takes, the longer the line becomes.
EPOS systems make checkout much faster, both in-person and online. Some systems only require a credit card reader plugged into a tablet or smartphone, so you can get customers in and out the door without amassing a queue behind them. Synqera reports that checkout is the top pain point for 73 percent of surveyed consumers, so it’s important to do what you can to not make them wait.
Enabling employees to be mobile
EPOS systems can also minimize queues because they can make your employees more mobile. Instead of confining them to the counter, they can walk around with their tablets and check people out anywhere in the store.
If customers are shopping online, they aren’t going to have to wait in a line regardless, but they will appreciate a simple checkout process that doesn’t require them to enter an abundance of information and create an account with a password. To expedite online payments, check out ePOS systems for payments on the go.
More knowledgeable employees
While your staff wanders around the store with respective devices in hand, they can do more than check people out; they have access to information customers may need. For instance, if something is running low on a shelf and a customer wants to purchase more, an ePOS system keeps track of inventory so that employees know exactly how much is on hand at any given time.
Instead of making the customer wait while your employee checks the back room, they can simply search for the information on the spot and answer the customer’s question.
Staff members are also able to make better suggestions when they have access to a store-wide database. This way, customers don’t need to look up their questions about specific products on the internet—they know that the employees are the right sources of information to go to.
Stocking the right items
EPOS systems monitor sales and compile relevant data into reports you can use to adjust your business strategy. When you know what is flying off the shelves and what is less popular, you know what you need to stock more and less of.
You can also create an omnichannel shopping experience. Say you are a brick-and-mortar retailer that also sells online—if someone purchases an item through your website, you need to update your inventory to reflect that sale.
A customer might see that the item is available in-store, show up in-person, and arrive disappointed to find that the item they expected to buy is no longer available. An ePOS system can update inventory in real-time across your sales platforms so that customers are never accidentally misled.
Customer loyalty programs
Do you offer customer loyalty programs to keep people coming back? EPOS systems can make it easier to manage. They enable you to create personalized discounts according to what type of shopper each customer is and better understand their preferences. You can also use this information to craft customized email messages for marketing purposes that people are less likely to delete without reading.
Multiple payment methods
Most people don’t carry much cash on them anymore. What if someone saw an item they loved in your window but could not buy it because they didn’t have enough cash in their wallets? It’s not that they couldn’t afford it—you just can’t accept credit cards or mobile wallets.
You should not stop accepting cash, of course, but you should be able to accept consumers’ favorite payment methods, including the contactless variety. When you are able to process more kinds of transactions, you open your doors to new potential customers.
Electronic point of sale systems can tremendously improve your customers’ experiences when they shop with you. How will you use ePOS software and hardware to cater to your customers’ needs?