Retail Customer Experience: Five Underutilized Features of the Modern POS
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is an summary of a current article from Retail Customer Experience, a daily news portal devoted to helping retailers differentiate the shopping experience.
The retail point-of-sale system has come a long way from its mechanical roots. The first cash register, patented in the late 19th century, did little more than ring up purchases and store cash. Today's POS does those things, of course, but it is also a sophisticated tool capable of amassing enormous pools of business intelligence.
But for many retailers, it is still essentially a cash register, and some of its most ROI-rich capabilities are going unused. We identified five POS features that retailers can make better use of:
Suggestive selling: Amazon has conditioned consumers to expect suggestive selling. While online retail is perfectly suited to the "you bought this, you might also like this" approach, a properly populated POS installation, combined with appropriate employee action, can create the same effect in the store.
It's not perfect for all flavors of retail - nobody is going to get out of line at the grocery store to get one item that is suggested at the checkout - but it's a perfect fit for many other purchasing environments where queuing isn't such an issue, such as a high-end mall apparel store.
Comprehensive remote management: Until just a few years ago, Allen Wier, director of retail industry marketing for NCR, said, many retailers were running DOS-based POS software, which made any sort of comprehensive remote management difficult. "Now, pretty much everybody is on Windows or Linux - in the U.S., mainly Windows," he said. "Now, you have the ability to do remote diagnostics."
Every platform is different, but most major POS vendors offer varying levels of remote management functionality. In NCR's case, for instance, the system can predict device failures based on the number of communication retries, as well as keep a line count on the receipt printer so that it knows when paper will run out.
Cashier training: Even in the busiest of stores, there are times when terminals are left unused. During these times, retailers can use the machines to carry out employee training. That training can be existing assets from the company's web site or Intranet, or it could be something designed especially for the terminal.
Inventory management: Retailers of any size already have inventory management systems at work in the back office. But integrating that system with the front-of-house speeds up business intelligence, giving managers a close-to-real-time view of what's selling, what is needed, and what opportunities are being missed.
Data mining and product assortment: Data generated by the POS enables managers to plan their restocking strategy, but it also enables a higher level of planning, specifically in regard to which products to carry at which stores. Many POS systems offer sophisticated Web-based dashboards that aggregate data across multiple store locations - and allow managers to "click down" into specific stores, to compare and contrast the activity of given products in different locations.
Discussion Questions: Which of the newer POS capabilities show the most promise? Which ones seem most easy to capitalize on and which will likely prove to be a challenge?