Choosing the right POS system can take the guesswork out of your business operations

Success in running any retail business requires you to contend with a variety of vital questions. With the right point of sale (POS) system, you have all the tools you need to address most of the issues you will face as an entrepreneur.

Specifically, you must find ways to thoroughly answer the following: How can you efficiently keep track of your valuable inventory? How can you personalize the shopping experience to meet the individual needs and preferences of each customer? How can you optimize the performance of every staff member to keep morale high and boost sales? 

Finally, how can you learn essential insights about your business so that you are able to optimize your services and profits at every stage of the inventory acquisition, sales and customer experience journeys?

Point of sale and inventory management.

Your POS system comes with built-in database capabilities that suit themselves perfectly to the inventory ordering, tracking, management, and reordering processes. 

Just use a barcode scanner peripheral to catalog each piece of merchandise when it arrives at your warehouse, and your system can be configured to follow its progress from storage until it leaves in your customer’s hands or electronic shopping cart.

The system’s capabilities can be further refined. You can even use it to alert you when quantities of an item are reaching a preset benchmark, allowing you plenty of time to re-order. 

Integrating with the POS’s reporting capabilities also lets you see which products are flying off the shelves and which are languishing so that you can make adjustments in future purchase quantities, change your store layout to promote weak sellers or offer bundles or discounts that take these insights into account. 

In the end, you will improve efficiency in your entire inventory process, thereby padding your bottom line and elevating the customer experience.

Customer service and personalization.

Whether you have 100 customers or 10,000, each person wants to feel unique and seen and heard by you and your brand. This can be a daunting prospect for busy entrepreneurs already fully occupied with keeping their operations up and running in a highly competitive sales space.

Fortunately, your POS is there to fill this critical need. The same database that assists with inventory is also vital in helping you to initiate and maintain a loyalty program that rewards frequent visits, incentivizes referrals and can even be set to customize the communications sent to reflect each customer’s previous buying history and stated preferences. 

Although you and your staff will be putting out relatively little effort, each of your valued buyers will feel singled out and cared about in the best possible ways. 

Many will organically share their delight by posting positive reviews on social media sites and referring their social contacts to your store or website.

Efficient employee management.

Your staff should be your best ambassadors no matter what job they fill with your organization. But how do you keep track of each of their schedules and productivity in order to provide the feedback and training they need to excel? 

You guessed it: with the help of your POS.

The system’s employee management software makes time sheets and scheduling a breeze. With its cloud-based software, you can make changes from anywhere that are immediately texted or emailed to each worker. The confusion and potential for errors that often run rampant with manual entry can now be things of the past.

Additionally, your system integrates with sales data, letting you see vital datapoints at a glance. Learn about how each worker is doing and where their strengths and weaknesses lie, or pull up a report that illustrates sales trends for specific time periods, locations, products, or promotional events. 

Once you are armed with these insights, you can provide each worker with the feedback, training, or alternative job responsibilities that will best meet your business needs and help them to grow and excel. 

When workers succeed and fill a role that fits with their talents, they are more likely to stay longer and project a positive attitude that customers will quickly recognize and appreciate.

Gaining crucial insights business-wide.

We have previously alluded to your POS’s real time reporting features, but they deserve a section of their own. 

Without a way to chart the course of your company’s functioning in a wide variety of areas, you do not have the information necessary to refine and improve your offerings, inform your investors, teach your staff, or meet your customers’ evolving needs. 

With its access to a gold mine of inventory, sales, and customer data and its ability to gather and organize this information according to your specifications, your POS has the tools you need to gain and harness these insights.

Of course, you need to do the initial work by obtaining customer permissions to take contact details, setting up your inventory system, and ensuring that employees utilize the features of your scheduling system. 

You should also ensure that your POS is fully integrated with any third-party software that you also use to relate to your customers or organize your finances. 

By laying this strong foundation, you can rest assured that the data your POS uses is complete and accurate, thereby leading to reports that you can utilize to enhance virtually every aspect of your operations.

A flourishing retail business stands on a strong foundation of inventory management, customer service and personalization, employee morale, and performance optimization and robust reporting. 

Your POS is in the perfect position to assist with all of these important tasks, leaving you with more free time to develop your business on the strength of the insights it reveals. 

f you are not already taking full advantage of its features, talk to your payment processing company about how to optimize your POS to promote your success and elevate customer satisfaction.