If you are the owner of a budding business retail store, you must have thought about improving your check-out system at least once. At times, you must have felt overwhelmed with the sheer amount of long lines and disgruntled customers with no solution in sight.
Customer experience is crucial to all businesses nowadays and especially for local retail stores. Considering that most of your consumers will have several other alternatives to shop at, you need to make sure that the way you treat your customers helps you drive in more and more regular customers every day.
A better retail check-out system can also be a boon for the back-end of your business. A well-organized system will make your employees’ lives easier and open up their time for more work. Moreover, a high employee satisfaction rate makes sure you retain your employees and go a long way. So, let’s go through some ways to upgrade your check-out system in no time.
Accept all forms of payment
Multiple times, a line gets halted from moving because of the lack of payment options. This kind of hold-up can be very annoying for the entire line-up. It may even cause some particular customers to stop shopping from your store as well permanently.
The best way to tackle this is to have a quick system of accepting all kinds of payments. These payments can range from cash, card to several mobile-based payment solutions. Ensure that all your systems are set up to make any payment and confirmed as quickly as possible.
A little bit of staff training can go a long way
Staff training and investing more in your employees can be one of the most important investments you can make for your business and growth. If you train all your staff to handle the cash register and process all payments quickly, your retail check-out experience will be exponentially streamlined.
This step includes training all of them at the cash register to have enough practice to memorize the process and several procedures for additional payments and products. All of them can take over the register or open a new one if all the existing ones are functioning at their maximum capacity.
Get a handy POS system
Getting a convenient POS system can be a massive help for you and your business in the long run. Having one system across all cash registers with the same operating software installed will ensure that uniformity is present, and all your data is stored and processed the same way.
It will make your employees much more comfortable, allowing them to be faster in their operations and processing multi-fold more customers than they usually would. A sound POS system also has additional features that will multiply your business’s productivity to a vast extent.
Besides, you will manage inventory and automatically update the warehouses and sales department whenever a sure thing starts to go out of stock. It will help you access everyday data of earnings, invoices, and products sold in one software.
You can go online and do your research before choosing to go with one POS system. Not all of them function the same, and it would be helpful if you went through your options to select one that fits your needs the best. Ensure you review them in stores and check the best POS system online because most of them are exclusively for sale on the company’s websites and not available with local retail stores.
Bring the cash register to your customer
With new technology budding these days, you can easily detach your cash registers from their stations and take them directly to the shopping customer. With new POS systems that work perfectly on iPads and tablets, your employees can carry them in their hands and process customers very quickly without making them stand in lines and waste their time.
In addition to being significantly faster than usual cash register setups and giving you the liberty to make the entire store a place to have product check-out, mobile POS systems also have the functionality of email receipts. It cuts down on long lines and helps your business switch to an eco-friendly model.
Moreover, these POS systems also come with add-ons that attach directly to your mobile device and integrate card functionality to the process. This feature is a proven way to accelerate your lines and keep your customers happy. In most cases, stores with this kind of functionality have seen increased foot traffic because customers prefer stores where they don’t have to stand in long and tedious lines.
In case this is not enough to convince you, mobile POS systems also open up the possibility of doubling your cash registers in no time. For days of peak rush like holidays or weekends, having more customer check-outs at the same time can be as easy as switching on another device and increasing the workforce instantly to handle the times of excess rush.
Offer online buying options
More than half of your customers already know what they will buy before they go into the stores. For customers like these, you can set up a portal for online purchases of your store. This way, customers can select everything they want to buy, add it to their cart, make the payment online, and only come to the store to pick-up their product.
It is a brand new way of retail shopping, and a vast number of retail chains are starting to implement it within their infrastructure. With the latest online shopping trend taking over people’s lives and the added fear of going out amidst a deadly pandemic, it is the best time for you to implement it in your own business. Not only are online payments much easier to handle, but it will also save time for both your customers and your employees.
We recommend you to look into options to streamline this process even further. A way to make this even faster is to create a specific pick-up counter. This counter will have every customer’s final order bagged and tagged for them to show their receipt, confirm their identity, and pick up their package in time.
