What are some of the reason customers become disatisfied and how can you use your point of sale system to avoid this?

We all know that some customers are just trouble no matter how hard yuo work to please them. However these type of people represent the minority, so we will not focus any time on these types of customers. The question we need to ask though is what turns a normally happy customers in to a disgruntled customer and then when we understand this what steps can we  take to avoid these. Also as this is a blog focused towards the retail and point of sale topic, how can we use our point of sale system to help minimise these issues.

As retailers we need to be aware that a customer who has a good experience may tell 1 or 2 people, a customer who has a bad experience will tell 8 to 10. For this reason we need to all that we can to minimise bad customer experiences through utilising our point of sale database.

 The first point to think through is times when we have become unhappy with the service provided by a retailer. When you think about retail sales the issues all revolve around either the quality of the product or the suitability of the prodeuct to meet the requirements of the customer.

First of all if we first assume that the quality of the product is fine an issue can arise if your staff recommend a product to a customer which does not meet the needs of the customer. For example a customer is going camping and is looking at sleeping bags. Now it is important that the retail staff in this situation find out from the customer their budget and the climatic conditions they plan to camp in. This information is either available via brochures or as a minimum needs to be accessible in your point of sale system so that your staff can advise the customer. Now if your staff advise the customer to purchase a sleeping back rate for 5+ degrees celcius and they go camping and it gets to -2 then the customer is likely to be very unhappy with your business. The problem is not with the product but it is with the non suitability of your product for what the customer needs. Also now because the customer has had a sleepless night, shivering in the cold they will be very unhappy and will come in seeking a refund. This situation could have been avoided if your staff receieved the appropriate training and also knew how to access the information in your point of sale system on the product. In some cases the product information is not available to your staff, so you as a business owner need to ensure you get this information in to your point of sale systems which should have support for an extended description.

Lets now deal with the second scenario when you have a defective product. Despite the best quality control provisions sometimes a product is faulty and so we need to make the process of a customer return as painless as possible for the customer while ensuring we have policies in place to protect the business from abusing our processors. First of all you need to have a clear policy for the return of goods that makes the process straigth forward for the customer to understand. You also need to be aware that this policy cannot remove the customers basic rights under common law and the laws of your state. The next step is that you need to be able to track the customer return in your point of sale system including the followon supplier return. This ensures that the customer cannot ask for more refunds than they are due and that you ensure you get a replacement from the supplier. So many retail businesses are very disorganised in the area of the supplier return which affects their profitability. Another important function is your point of sale supports this functionality is to record notes in the original sale or at least the sales return  on the reasons for the return and any other details that will help in the management of your customers. Another very helpful feature I have seen in some point of sale systems is an event log where you can record the the details of all commuinication in the customer management centre. The number of times having this log of communication can resolve a customer issues is amazing. A customer is complaining and you are able to go and read back to the customer all the steps that have been followed and what the customer has agreed to on a previous occasion soon reminds the customer who has forgotten what has happened in the past or is just being difficult.

Another method where your point of sale system can help avoid problems and help you provide better service is in the area of the customer profile. If you can quickly view purchase history and attribute on the customers interests this can help your staff be more aware of the customers requirements. It also is nice for the customer to get the impression that you know about them and are interested in what they are interested in. This is acheived in your point of sale by having tools to quickly view customer history and to be able to record attributes about the customer in their customer management area.

I hope you have been encouraged to review your point of sale system and think about how you can better use is as a tool to manage your moments of truth with a customer. A moment of truch is how well your business as in your staff deal with every interaction with a customers. The better your systems and the way you use your systems such as your point of sale system the better you manage these moments of truch and the more your business will grow.

Boost sales today with a marketing campaign to your point of sale customer database

Today's article is very practical and is about making contact with your customers and driving them to your web site or your store.

How do you do this

Step 1. Analyse you sales and find out what your customer are interested in. To do this you will use your point of sale reports on what stock is moving. YOu then use this information to note what stock is moving. Now that you know this you then need to find and source related products. You may already have these on your shelves.

Step 2. You need to extract from your point of sale system those customer who have purchased a range of products that are related to the product you are going to offer customers.

Step 3. Formulate your offer and the sale pitch

Step 4. With the list in hand and your offer exeute your point of sale campaign.

The above 4 steps can take minutes or hours depending on the capability of your software to provide the tools you need. A good point of sale system will provide campaign wizards where this process is all very simple.

Checkout the PBSA POS CRM module to see how easy this can be

Profits are about managing your margins and the way you do this is via your POS system

To be profitable it is all about selling your goods for more than you paid for them. This tasks as simple as it may sound is not so easy. The reason for this is that the standard retailer can have 500 to many thousands of product lines and it is a difficult task to price all these items and manage your margins.

Lets look as a standard retail scenario. You have a store full or stock and this stock cost you money to hold because you finance your stock or have to pay your suppliers bill via your bank overdraft or you hve to pay interest to your suppliers if you cannot sell the stock within their 30 or 60 day terms. So what this means is that you need access to information on what stock is moving and what stock is not moving. You then need to use this information to determine your pricing. Stock that is not moving you need to find ways to move it, as it is costing you to have it sit on the shelf. To do this you need to know what it cost you and how much you can discount the stock. Sometimes it is of benefit to sell the stock under costs because of the cost of holding the stock.

ON the other side with the stock that is moving you need to maximise your profits by charging your customers as much as you can while mairtaining as much volume as you can. Now different businesses have different models, some are high turnover low margin and others are low turnover but high margins and then everyone else is some where in between.

Ok so how do I use my POS to manage this process.

Well a good POS system will provide you with reports on what stock is moving and what stock is not. You then need to be able to view the stock that is not movng and be able ot quickly view the current price, the average price and last cost price and then be able to adjust the stock levels. Unfortunatelty many POS systems makes this hard as they force you to drill in to a sinple product at a time to alter it price. One of the benefits of the PBSA POS system is the abiility to view in one screen all the products in a particular category including the sotck level, the cost for the stock, the current price and the eGP and EGP%. Then on this same screen you can adjust the price for multiple items and see the changes to the eGP. This is a very powerful feature fo the PBSA POS system that saves you the business owner many, many hours of hard work.

Managing your pricing levels and margins is a daily process and one that is vital to your success. To do this you need to ensure your POS gives you access to the right reports and the gives you tools to use this information to make adjustments quickly and easily.

I loko forward to providing more detaisl on tricks to managing your margins in future articles on POS and POS systems

How does a point of sale system compare with a cash register

Many different stores across the world have cash registers. If you are one of them why should you consider upgrading to a point of sale system?

Benefits of a cash register

1. Cash registers are less expensive than a point of sale system
2. Cash registers are simple to use because all you have to do is ring up the price on the price label

While to some extent the above two statements are correct there is still another side to consider.

1. While a cash register may be less expensive up front, what are the real costs versus a point of sale?

A cash register cannot track your stock levels and most important your margins. Retail store operation is all about knowing what stock is moving and maintaining your margins on this stock. It sounds simlpe that to be profitable all you need to do is sell the majority of your stock for more than you paid for it. This task however is not so easy to implement. You need access to information that tells you what stock is selling, what stock is not selling and what margin you have on this stock. 10 of the same items on the shelf could have a different cost price depending on when and from where they were purchased.

This need for information is where a cash register fails miserably. All a cash register can do is record how much you sold an item for not what it costs you. The cash register cannot tell you anything about the stock movement or the margins. This is where a point of sale system which may have cost you more money at the   start saves you thousands and thousands of dollars. What a point of sale system provides the business owner is instant access to information which they can use to make business decisions.

What about the cost of labelling products. WIth a cash register you need to label each product with the price. This means that if you want to run a special you need to go and label all the items with the changed price. Then when the sale is over you have to go and re-lable them again.

One of the key benefits used by many retails stores using a point of sale is that they now use shelf labels rather than product price labels. This means when you run a sale all you need to do is change the one shelf label and you are done. In addition the point of sale system supports barcode scanning speeds the checkout process and ensure greater control of stock.

What about simplicity of use?

It is true the process of ready a price label and entering the price is as simple as you can get, athough from the point of sale system the scanning of a barcode is just as simple an efficient. What about if you make a mistake on the cash register, the process of removing the item from the sale takes more effort than in the point of sale where you have the ability to easily edit or remove lines items for the sale.

So why should I keep my cash register?
If oyou run a very simple operation that has minimal stock to control then I agree stick with your current cash register. Although I beleive in all cases the power of the informaton the point of sale system will provide makes the real cost of the  cash register to high.

There are many other benefits of a point of sale that you should consider. I will explain these in future articles. 

Touch screen technology is becoming part of our lives more and more each day. The growth of iphone usage and other touch screen phones has shown so many of use how nice they are to use. Microsoft is also committed to expanding the usage of touch screens with the changes to Windows 7 and a long term commitment which will see every home having a touch screen.

At the consumer level touch screens have also come down a lot in price. These lower cost touch screens are great for the office desk although they are not robust enough for the retail environment.

So what about point of sale and touch screens?

There is still a lot of variance in the point of sale market place. If you go in to the major supermarket stores you will defintately see touch screen point of sale systems. Thne at other retailers such as clothing stores and electrical stores you will not see as many touch screens. Why is this.

Well the touch screen brings a lot of advantages to high volume sales points and where there is fresh food and integration with scanner and scales. The commercial touch screen hardware is normally fanless and resistant ot moisture.

So where is a touch screen suitable and not suitable. A touch screen is perfect when there is a simple check out process. For example in the supermarket you scan or weigh the item and move on the the necxt item and then process the sale. However if the store sales process is more complex such as the need to adjust price, the need to access more detailed information on margins, stock availability and more then a touch screen point of sale system may not be as suitable.

So what is my advice when a touch screen point of sale system should be used?

• For a store with grocery items then I recommend the touch screen as it makes the sales process very simple for staff to implement.
• If you run a restaurant, cafe, pizza store or fast food outlet I also recommend a point of sale system. Just make sure if you do phone orders and deliveries that the point of sale software has a phone orders module.
• If you run a clothing store then it is a 50/50 choice. If you like the simplicity of the touch screen then go for it, it you feel you have a more complex checkout then stay with normal hardware.

Finally in regards to hardware make sure you go for commercial grade touch screen hardware which includes being fanless, having the terminal and touch screen as one unit and ensuring the touch screen is resistant to moisture.

Stay tuned for more information in features to look out for in a good touch screen point of sale system

How to segment your data with your point of sale system 

One of the biggest mistakes I see retail businesses make today with their point of sale is to not record sales history against the customer.

What I do see is retails stores recording their sales using customer 'Cash Sale'. What this means is that you do not have a record of what the customer likes to purchase and their contact details so that you can better serve them and market directly towards them.

So how can I use my point of sale system as a data segmentation tool?

It is as simple as recording as many sales against the customers record rather than as a cash sale. To do this you need to incentivise your customers to identify who they are. The best way to do this is with a loyalty program. This way the customer shows their card and you can scan it and then record the sales history against their record.

Now you have this data the next step is using this information to run targeted marketing campaigns. Stay tuned for my next blog entry on how to run a targeted marketing campaign from your point of sale (POS) system.

What makes a good touch screen

The most important aspect is "how easy is the touch screen system to use.

The image below shows you some of the main screens in the PBSA POS touch screen module.

The key components you can see are

• Large buttons
• The ability to have different color button
• Everything at your finger tips
• The number of buttons on a screen

The other very important aspect is your ability to manage the setup of all your screens. Every business is different and so you need your touch screen point of sale system (pos) to enable you to design the layout of your screen.

Why this is important is to make the touch screen system easy to use and to reduce the number of button presses/clicks to get you item added to the sales screen.

For more details on touch screens go to the following:  touch screen point of sale system page

Have you ever walked into a cafe or fast food store and gone up the counter to place your order and seen the kaos that was happening?

We all remember the times when our order has been lost and after waiting half an hour we have to wait another 30 minutes.

How can you manage your sales and your preparation areas better

The key to a more efficient sales and preparation process is systems. When I talk about systems I am not just referring to computer systems alone but also preparation systems.

So often you see stores where the sale is done on an old cash register, then after the sale the order has to be written down and past through to the kitchen. The order then has to be passed around the various preparation areas. This creates confusion and increase the potential of lost orders and poor customer service.

So what is an ideal simple approach

1. Get yourself a touch screen computer with good touchscreen point of sale software

The reason is that sofwtare provides greater control over the sales process and also provides tools for workflow management. If you can control all the buttons on the touch screen POS and also have orders printed in multiple locations subject to what is in the order then you are positioned to improve your customer service dramtiaclly

The benefit of the touch screen is that  you do not have a mouse and keyboard cluttering the desk and getting ruined by sticky fingers. In additoin a nice touch screen with large buttons makes the sales process so easy and simple.

Additional things to look for in the work flow process is support for phone orders and deliveries. The key aspects you need is a touch screen pos that allows you to track the preparation, the dispatch and the payment status of each order. If you have a high volume of phone orders you may need a dedicated touch screen for this process.

These are just some of the things to consider to improve your customer service. Stay tuned for more tips.

PBSA POS launches new blog. We plan on keepnig our customers and potential customers up to date on everything that is happening in the world of point of sale, pos systems, touch screen hardware and touchscreen systems.