Is your POS still just a giant calculator? If so, you might want to consider an upgrade. More and more businesses are expecting POS features in order to perform a variety of tasks – and POS providers are delivering!
As a business owner, you initially want your POS to seamlessly finalize a sale. That might involve integrating it with a printer, a cash register, and/or a scale. But there have been significant developments in machine processing power, as well as in the fields of data analytics and artificial intelligence. The implications of these developments can easily be seen in your personal devices, but your POS is no separate entity. State-of-the-art POS solutions (especially Cloud POS) offer a wide variety of integrated services, so here’s a taste of what you might be missing:
1) Email Integration
If part of your brand’s principles is to be environmentally-conscious, then having e-receipts is probably a good idea. You may offer both paper and e-receipts, one or the other, or forego the paper option as a whole. E-receipts are good for both parties involved in the transaction. You both have less clutter, making the customer’s life tidier and making sales easier to manage on your end. But, there’s a catch.
Offering e-receipts is by far the easiest way to get your customer’s email address. With their consent, this opens the gate to email marketing. Email marketing is proven to be the most effective way to acquire and retain customers. It opens a two-way portal of communication, it builds your credibility with them, and it strengthens your relations. Without this service integrated in your POS, you’d have to switch to a whole other platform (Gasp! Maybe even pen and paper), and otherwise persuade your customer to provide their email.
2) Customer Loyalty
Developments in memories, processors, and data analytics software mean that we are more powerful than ever in recording and predicting human behavior. This ties right into sales, so it might be beneficial for your POS to be integrated with your loyalty program for customer retention. If your POS could keep track of your customer’s sales habits and history, it could personalize the loyalty program for each customer based on their preferences and expectations. This leads to a satisfied customer, and a satisfied customer is a retained customer, and increasing your retention by 5% is anywhere between a 25% and 95% sales increase.
3) Inventory Management
Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to do manual inventory? While inventory software has been around for a long time, it really meant the same pen-and-paper inventory in an easier presentation on a machine. But integrating your inventory with your POS introduces almost instantaneous inventory. First off, having a cloud POS means that all your different points of sale are in sync with one another, and this connection to a central database means that they’re capable of updating your inventory in real time. POS with this feature will also often alert you when you need to order or supply more of a product because it’s running out, or because there is expected high demand.
4) Sales Reports
Sales reports on a POS have pretty much become an axiomatic feature. You want to see how your business is doing in a sleek, straightforward presentation, and you don’t really want a separate piece of software to do that. Having this feature on your POS saves you time and allows you to make business decisions in a more dynamic manner. You don’t have to wait until the end of the day, week, or month. You can access all of those numbers and graphs at any given point in time, and adjust accordingly. The flexibility this offers you means that you’ll have a competitive edge on the market.
With all of these integrated features becoming more standard expectations, POS providers Like Countr are led to re-conceptualize their solutions. Shifting our perspective from a point of sale to a platform of sale is a result of the growing realization that a POS is no longer just a giant calculator. Rather, it is the station from which you manage your business.