How a smart terminal can help you keep your finger on the pulse of your business.

You may not have gone to medical school, but running a business can often make you feel like a doctor. Juggling a host of high-stakes priorities while monitoring your patient’s — or business’s — well-being is a full-time job in itself. Fortunately, you can enlist the help of a highly competent assistant in the form of a smart terminal!

What is a smart terminal system?

No doubt, you are already well-acquainted with the terminal or card reader that is used to accept your customers’ payments. But did you realize that this hardware-software combination has received a gigantic facelift in the past few years? Today’s smart terminals make operating virtually every aspect of your retail store faster, easier, and more secure.

The advantages of a smart terminal.

Payment processing is, of course, one of the most vital jobs your smart terminal performs countless times each day. With speed and efficiency, it reads payment details and safely transmits them to the other players in the payments journey. Within seconds, a response is sent back indicating whether the purchase has gone through. All the while, the buyer’s data remains encrypted and as safe as possible from hackers.

If this were all that your smart terminal could do, it would still be amazing. However, it can also accomplish the following feats:

• Help you keep track of your inventory. With the assistance of your barcode scanner and the database function built into your POS, you will always know the exact quantities of every item you sell. As a result, the guesswork is gone from re-ordering, and your marketing campaigns can be more targeted.
• Manage your employees more effectively. Up until now, getting a handle on staff hours, vacation times, and performance may have been a challenge that you could never quite grasp. However, your smart payment device can automate schedules that you can then easily tweak, track vacation and clock-in times, and can even let you see each of your associates’ sales performance levels with just a few clicks. With that valuable information in hand, you can more efficiently delegate tasks, reward excellence, and provide targeted training.
• Reward your best customers. Once again, your smart terminal’s database function shines. After customers provide you with their contact details and other facts, you can welcome them into a loyalty program that incentivizes frequent future purchases. By the way, it also gives you all the contact details you need to send newsletters, promotions, and other emails that will help shoppers feel like a part of the family.
• Generate reports that give valuable insights. When you are running from one urgent need to the next, you hardly have time to sit down and see how well your business is doing in the big picture. In the past, generating a report might have taken you hours, but that is no longer the case thanks to smart terminals and POS systems. With just a few clicks, you can generate reports that clearly show sales data, customer analytics, employee performance, profits, losses, and much more.

Just as a physician must effectively treat several patients at once, running a successful retail operation involves the ability to multitask. Your smart payment device can give you an entire toolkit that you can leverage to obtain happier and better-directed employees, satisfied customers, and more robust profits in your pocket.