Mobile/handheld point of sale software holds a tremendous amount of potential for small retail businesses, allowing them to operate like a big box store. Through advanced tools and automated approaches, small retailers can keep up with the market changes and increasingly competitive environment. Yet, many small businesses fail to use their POS software to its fullest potential—many features go unused. This could mean a loss in new business or productivity.
Try These Tips
Employees who have not fully recognized the functionality of their POS software need to become more adept and engaged with it. We have compiled some easy and cost-effective tricks to keep your employees engaged with their daily activities.
1. Provide Training
After employees are trained on a new software, it is assumed that they use the software to its fullest potential. However, during the learning process, they will have an order of importance for the functions that are necessary to perform their job. Many times, the lesser important functions are not properly used.
In order to avoid this, conduct periodic and brief training sessions on all the functions, so everyone is up-to-speed and able to use the software to its fullest potential. This training can also educate new employees that are unfamiliar with the software.
2. Customer Resource Tool
Your POS software is a customer resource management tool. More than a list of customers, it records their contact information and remembers details about their interactions with your business. Having this information allows you to drill down and see the demographics of your customers, the geographical coverage of your business, and their buying habits. All of this becomes excellent marketing data to deepen your relationship with current customers and provide a strategically targeted market for new customers.
3. Sales Reporting
A detailed sales report indicates the health of your business, and is one of the more frequently pulled reports managers and owners examine. Just as important is a report on the average revenue per sale. If you want to grow your company, then grow this number. Another great report is sales of individual goods, which show what’s hot and what’s not. Take care of dead stock and the least popular items on your shelves, allowing you to adjust your inventory to the market demands.
4. Share the Data with Your Employees
In a small business, employees wear many hats to perform different functions. Everyone can benefit from the knowledge of the health of the company. Sharing some of the financial data with them empowers their actions in other areas of the business, directly and indirectly impacting sales. This also gives them some autonomy to digest the business information and contribute to providing new and creative ways to increase sales.
5. Encourage Regular and Consistent Data Entry
This tip coincides with the first one—training your employees. Inconsistent data entry happens in virtually every company, because a couple workers opt out of using some of the functions in a software or find work-arounds to perform their job. To encourage employees to use all of the functions, establish rewards for them and present them during the training sessions. Your mobile POS system performs better when all of the customer data is entered into it.
A Growing Problem
A major study revealed that large and mid-sized corporations failed to utilize the software in place to more effectively run their business. Over $7 billion dollars were wasted on unused software and software functions. That figure equaled about $250 per computer. They warned against the rising tide of underutilized business software, and encouraged applying all aspects of the software or investing in the right packages. The authors of the study believed that same holds true for small businesses. Your business can avoid the pitfalls of under-utilization through understanding the functionality of your POS software in order to minimize loss of productivity and new business.