POS systems are used so often in day-to-day business operations, we sometimes can forget to stop and think about how they could be improved. Managing a business often means that you aren’t actually behind the till doing the serving, so you may not be aware of the pitfalls in your POS system. This article aims to help you find some simple solutions that will ultimately make your worker’s lives easier and make you more money too.
What Is POS?
POS, or Point of Sale, describes the act of a customer making a payment for a good or service. Where POS systems come into it is how you, as the seller, take that payment. In times gone by this would have been as simple as taking a note of the price of an item, punching that into a glorified calculator, and then giving the customer their change. Nowadays you can have all sorts of information linked to your till, like real-time stock levels or the ability to apply a specific discount code to a customer’s order. The demand for the perfect POS system has led to companies like posusa.com springing up and offering bespoke solutions to your customer service needs. Choosing the right system for you is important and you should make sure that it is optimized for your business.
Time = Money
It’s a cliche I know, but in the world of customer-facing sales, it is true. Think about it
this way, imagine you own a big bar with an extensive range of spirits. Your till is slow and it is very hard to find the right product that you are trying to sell. It takes your staff, on average, three minutes to complete a single order, from inputting it into the till, to the payment going through. Now, that might not sound like a long time but that means that a single bar-tender can, at most, only do 20 orders per hour.
Imagine if you could complete orders in one minute, you would be tripling your sales potential! This is where having an optimized POS system really comes into its own. The quicker you can serve your customers the better your service and your profits will become.
Ease Of Use Is Important!
As well as making your sales more efficient it is also worth thinking about accuracy. Let’s go back to the bar example for a minute. You’ve hired a new member of staff and they are working away. You go and check on them halfway through their shift and realize they have been selecting the wrong item for one of your spirits. The issue here is two-fold, firstly they could have been selling a premium whisky and charging for the house scotch which would mean you’d be losing a lot of money, or they could be doing the opposite and charging a customer for the premium whisky and only giving them the house. Secondly, this is going to totally mess up your stock levels, especially if this issue is not addressed quickly.
Making sure that your POS system has a search function or even a picture attached to the item sold would help keep your business running smoothly, with as few short-changed customers as possible.
Streamline Your Process
Taking a moment to think about what you need to streamline your selling process could be the key to your success. It will certainly increase your selling potential and it may well make your staff happier too. After all, if a worker of yours has to interact with a less than ideal system every day, they may well start to get frustrated and give a less good service to your customers. Consult with your customer service team and see what improvements they would like to see. Making sure you get this right is a win-win in every way!
I hope this article has given you some ideas for how you can boost your business and make it more efficient. Some minor inconveniences may seem inconsequential at first but when you amplify these problems across time you can see how the inefficiencies can add up to significant losses. Spending a little bit of time thinking about what improvements you could make will have a long-lasting impact on your business. Safe in the knowledge that your team is happy and able to do their job as efficiently as possible, you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.
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