5 Things to Manage for a More Effective POS
The point of sale is the crux of the retail operation. If you want to be profitable, you’ve got to have an effective and efficient point of sale (POS) system. The following five components of your retail operation must be managed efficiently if you expect your POS to deliver profits.
- Customer relationships – At the heart of an retail operation is customer relationships. If you can’t manage the relationship with your customers well, then you might as well hang up your retail cap. This is absolutely essential, from capturing personal data such as phone and mailing address to collecting information on past purchases, the more you know about each customer, the better you can manage that relationship.
- Mobile integration – Today’s retail environment is a multi-channel environment. That means allowing your customer to search for products and make purchases on their computers, and even on their mobile phones.
- Product lookup – Being able to find products quickly will speed up your point-of-sale interactions. When a customer needs a product, your staff should be able to look it up by product name, vendor, SKU, or other parameters and get it into your customer’s hands quickly. Better yet, ring it up on the spot as another employee retrieves it from the shelf.
- Manage your promotions – Promotions rules management should be integrated into your POS system so that products ring up correctly at the cash register, bulk discounts are offered when necessary, and other specials do not hold your customers up when they are trying to get out of your store. Promotional rules are as much a part of your POS system as they are a part of marketing.
- Productivity monitoring – If you pay your employees productivity bonuses or commissions on sales, then you need to track that at the POS. A good point of sale POS system will include that ability as a basic feature.
If your retail store is going to be profitable, it has to be efficient at the point of sale. There’s no way around it.
