High time for your business to get a Hi5 POS!
Nature has bestowed on us five elements – land, water, fire, air, space – the right management of which ensures a good life and enables a great living.
Business is no different. It is driven by these five elements – customers, employees, suppliers, partners/stakeholders, brands – the careful management of which ensures survival and enables success.
Human life embraces five elements according to mythology, biology, or any other ‘ology’ that we eulogize. Business life, on the contrary, has but just one ‘ology’ to grasp, garner, and gain from – Technology.
Not to put too fine a point on it, technology is the only terminology to describe the ideology of encapsulating the methodology of embracing customers, employees, suppliers, stakeholders, and brands. Apology for the use of too many ‘ology’!
If technology is the fulcrum of a business, a simple and staid Point of Sale (POS) is the fundamental centrality of it. Call it the pivot around which business operates and organizes itself.
What is a POS, boss?
POS system helps businesses manage billing, accounting, inventory, purchasing, reporting, expense management, and security, all in one place. Right from the time you make a decision to open up a store to the time when your business opens its wings to fly and seek far-off skies, a POS system is integral to all of it. The wind beneath your wings, to put it more eloquently!
Gone are days when POS was referred to as just payment collection devices. Just like how fire and water are being an integral part of our lives today, from the time we wake up to the time we sleep, POS is no different for a business.
For retail and restaurant businesses, the right point of sale software or POS system can help delight its customers, manage business operations with minimal and least skilled staff, collaborate with suppliers for better profitability, get complete control on your inventory with utmost accuracy, and help you make timely decisions on the move. Like how you embrace five elements of nature for survival in life, here are five reasons you need to encircle POS to succeed in business!
1. Delight customers with a breezy experience
Whether you run a Kirana or a medium-scale business or large format or enterprise, your customer is your hero. Right from the time your customer enters your store, glances at the inventory, inquiries about product availability, buy items from his wish list, checks out the cart, pays for the bill, gives feedback, and leaves the store, every single step has to be seamless.
And how do you do it? POS, what else!
The right POS system helps you personalize your customer’s shopping experience – be it offline or online – by eliminating the friction in each touchpoint of a customer journey. Following are the areas where a POS system can help you define a delightful customer experience:
- Set up compelling offers to bring them to visit online or offline
- Communicate compelling reasons to visit with SMS / WhatsApp / Email alerts
- Play the part of a shopping assistant to check the price, offer, and stock availability
- Super-fast checkout experience with relevant product suggestions to buy more
- Let customers pay with multiple modes: cash, card, wallets, UPI, loyalty points
- Get feedback about the shopping experience to identify areas of improvement
Neither a tall mountain nor towering canyons can stop the wind. So can be your store experience for customers – breezy and easy with the right POS system. Having said that, should the burden tip down on the employees to deliver this experience? Well, that takes us to the next element.
2. Fire-up business operations; don’t burn staff energy
When you have to prioritize the customers, somebody else should take the load to deliver the defined dream experience. This ultimately results in loading more work to your staff. People often erroneously believe they can earn more if they let their staff burn more. This myth is why retail suffers one of the highest attrition rates across all industries. The trick is making them work smarter, not burn longer!
An intuitive, easy-to-use, secure POS system can help your staff manage the business operations efficiently with minimum skills and count. POS software can majorly reduce the number of steps involved in doing a job, thereby reducing the time and energy spent on it. For instance, your purchase inward work might take 5 to 7 steps, like receiving goods from the supplier, verifying the supplier invoice against the purchase order, verifying the goods received against the purchase order, adding new products to the master, fixing the price for the products, raising disputes for short/excess products, initiating the payment for the purchase.
With the right POS software, you could eliminate verification, restriction steps, and inward goods in maybe 2 or 3 steps: count the goods received and punch entry, fix price and start selling. POS will take care of mismatches against purchase orders vs. inward, raise credit/debit notes, suggest prices based on sales history and help you perform payments directly. This way, you could eliminate the need for multiple skilled employees for doing a job. Not just the purchasing operation, be it your stock auditing, billing, accounting entry, fixing the prices, pulling out the reports, initiating the payments, all of the high manpower involved operations in your business can be managed efficiently with the right POS system.
Energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only be transferred. It is the same in business. You become a good conductor of energy and transfer energy from suppliers and pass it to customers. Here’s how you do it.
3. Flow like water, to connect and collaborate with stakeholders
When you connect, collaborate, and conceive the supplies right, you procure right, price tight and pass on the benefits to customers. An end-to-end automation solution like POS software makes your business understand customer buying behaviour, plan your purchases to operate with light inventory, negotiate with the supplier, price it attractively based on the accurate calculation of margin, liquidate ageing stocks at the right time, and ultimately become the most preferred shopping spot for your customers.
POS system helps you manage the entire ecosystem of stakeholders into a single platform with integrations like loyalty, payments, banking, e-commerce, reordering solutions, business intelligence solution providers. This will ensure your POS system brings the seamless connection of information from all sources to give a superior customer experience and simplified operation experience. When your employees are happy, your customers are happy. When your customers are happy, you are happy. When you are happy, your family is happy. Speaking of family, what if I say you can balance family and business at ease if you can adopt the right POS software?
4. Travel more by making timely decisions on the move
You force your presence in your store for three major reasons: Monitor operations, Address issues and Make and execute decisions. Being in store might give you the power to handle the above, but it robs you of the power to move ahead. Increasing your dependency on stores will take away your time and decrease the drive to expand the business. You can avoid this predicament by asking one simple question to yourself: Am I really needed in my store?
POS system helps businesses with online reports, which you can access from anywhere, anytime. Being stuck to your store is no more a need, should you use the right point of sales software. Not just monitoring, the POS system has integrated personal business assistant applications which can notify critical business happenings instantly, help you manage approval requests, execute decisions using task management solutions. Whoever said businessmen can’t work from home hasn’t heard of POS. POS systems can empower you to move across the space yet help you make decisions on the go. When on the move, should you be worried about what may happen without your presence?
5. Grow efficiently across the lands with security, reliability, and accuracy
Growth is guaranteed in business by two things: increasing profit and reducing costs. Even when you invest the right amount of money, time and effort, you cannot achieve operational excellence unless you have a tight process in place. Business steps into the growth phase only when there are no niggling issues or nonsensical discrepancies when executing operations.
Even while present in the store, there are areas where you can’t take control of, viz data security, theft, inventory pilferage, excessive stocking, damage/waste control and fraudulent payments/product returns.
When you are focused on increasing profit and reducing costs, these niggling issues might hinder your growth aspirations. POS software is your saviour in securing the business data with timely cloud or local backup, maintaining the user privileges, controlling the data access, intimating the potential disputes in inventory at the right time and reducing the scope of frauds in checkout.
All in all, a POS system helps you delight customers with minimal staff with the least skills, yet gives you the power to make decisions on the go with 100% accuracy and reliability, resulting in guaranteed growth!
