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Understand and serve your customers better, even if you have 500,000 of them
Retailing is hard. You’re dealing with numerous not-very-loyal customers, doing lots of low-value transactions, with workers who aren’t threatening to win any Nobel prizes anytime soon. To make your profits, you have to be very disciplined, very alert, and very customer-focused. And you also need a cast-iron stomach, because this pesky little development called globalization is increasing competition and putting downward pressure on prices for all players.
WHEN THE amateurs and weaklings drop out, who’ll be left standing? As the US and European experiences show, the survivors will be the ones that succeed in maintaining product and service quality while at the same time keeping costs down. In the retail world, keeping service quality up and costs down is impossible without information technology. Competition forces prices down, as we see daily in various retail fields (consumers say hooray for competition). And as prices go down, inefficient players get squeezed out. You can’t expect any sympathy; it’s the law of the marketplace: economists applaud it; enlightened governments base policies on it. The players who succeed in controlling their service quality and their costs are most likely the ones who have been savvy with their information technology investments.
Alert entrepreneurs have learned the hard way
that computerizing acc
ounting is not enough; that’s just the ante to stay
in the game. It does nothing to help you attain service excellence on the
retail floor. It’s like putting wheels on a car: that’s a rock-bottom
requirement, no way a performance-boosting tweak. To attain excellence,
you don’t empower just your accounting department; you must also empower
the very people who render services directly to your customers – your
salesclerks, floorwalkers, cashiers, etc. You empower them by giving them
real-time access to information that lets them do their jobs brilliantly.
Real-time information lets you attain personalized service. Your store rep would be better able to suggest relevant new services or products if she knew the week’s specials or sale items.
Your store manager could decide more quickly to accept a return product if she could reliably verify right now that the bad or unwanted product was indeed bought from her branch.
Your branch manager might be able to plan her inventory better if she could identify the best- to worst-selling products at her branch. She could identify which salesclerk needs additional training if she could view each salesclerk’s transactions at her branch.
If your front-line people had these capabilities, they would be able to do their jobs in a way that impressed and delighted all your customers. But none of the above information can be obtained from your conventional accounting software.
Balmori Software’s SURE! Point of Sale System (POS), a customer service and branch management solution, is a tool to empower establishments to attain service excellence at the retail floor level.
Speed and accuracy are the key to outstanding customer service. People are impatient; and modern urban living makes them even more jealous of their time. It’s possible that a manual monitoring system could provide all the information cited in the scenarios just described, but it certainly couldn’t provide them instantaneously, on demand, fifty times a day.
TO A CUSTOMER
making a warranty claim, five minutes waiting for the facts
to be verified by the back office is five more minutes of uncertainty and
stress. Customer stress is not going to give you a reputation for
service excellence.
Outstanding customer service is the key to success. SURE! POS addresses one increasingly common complaint of business owners: “I want to get beyond basic financial accounting; knowing my balance sheet and income statement is not enough. I want my software to help me improve my service quality and thus my ability to win market share.”
SURE! POS captures the details of your sales transactions as you do the transactions. (Hence, no tedious data encoding at the end of the day.) It transforms all this raw data into accessible information that users can get their hands on in real time right on the sales floor, anytime they need to, as often as they need to. This empowers everyone in the business to render outstanding customer service by having relevant information – about customer preferences, about products, about past transactions - at their fingertips at all times.
SURE! POS empowers your people at the point of service – floorwalkers, salesclerks, cashiers – to render outstanding service, service that clearly outshines that of the competition.
A credible, working solution, not vaporware. SURE! POS is available, working, and ready to install right now. Right now, not next week, not next year. This is not "vaporware" that is promised for some vague future time, and hoping to use your operation as a guinea pig when it does come out. It is a robust, time-tested, and stable software solution that will have an impact on your service reputation and profitability from Day 1.
SURE! POS is a software package; it requires no fancy hardware component other than an ordinary PC. (It will also run on your existing POS hardware, as long as it is PC architecture, Pentium 1 series or better).
SURE! POS is part of a complete retail solution: If your business requires it, SURE! POS connects and communicates with our SURE! DMS enterprise software solution to give you a complete, integrated inventory control, A/R, A/P and accounting solution.
Click here to learn about our retail sector software solutions.
Questions? Reactions? Write to balmori@balmorisoftware.com.