The festive season embodies a potential golden goose for retailers and consumers alike. It continues to be a really important shopping period even in the aftermath of the wide-reaching pandemic and the tensions between certain countries across the world that had grossly affected festive retail sales globally over the last 30 months. If utilized appropriately, this festive period can be the happiest time of the year for both the retailers and their customers.
For retailers, it is the best time to start optimizing customer experience and be the retailer of choice. But to do that, they have to really equip themselves in time with the right techniques, technologies, and trained store staff in order to raise the level of experience that their customers expect from their brand in order to reap the true rewards of the festive shopping buzz. The top 5 steps to do this are:
1. Know your customers
The holiday season brings new customers. Know what customers are really looking for in their shopping experience during the holiday season. Take the time and effort to ask questions and get meaningful feedback from all channels. Understand the demographics of the area and choose your product offering accordingly. Store each customer’s information in the retail CRM. Plus, you can track and analyse their buying behaviour and preferences to see which products are trending and which are lagging, so you can personalize offers and increase loyalty.
2. Personalization is the key to meeting customer expectations
Use all the online and offline data collected throughout the year and send your existing customers a curated list of gift ideas, holiday promotions and offers. Not only does this show that your brand cares about its customers, it also reduces the amount of time they spend thinking about what to buy next. They can spend more time browsing and buy/want more products from your store.
Personalized offers keep customers interested and discounts/offers essentially encourage them to buy more! With ETP Accelerator, ETP’s advertising planning tool, you can implement special campaigns for buyers or customer segments and easily define business rules based on goods, time and location.
3. Go Omni-channel – Be Where Your Customers Are
Omni-channel retailing is a consumer-centric approach that refers to the adoption of strategies, different means of engagement, and a seamless approach to the consumer experience across all available shopping channels. Not only does this help organizations focus on their business and implement infrastructure changes, it also enables a consistent experience to attract and retain customers, resulting in increased sales. With ETP, brick-and-mortar retailers can implement a unified business and seamlessly manage their brands and customer relationships. ETP V5 Omni-channel Retail Solutions enable a unified omni-channel experience through retail digital transformation capabilities such as Book Online Pickup in Store (BOPIS), Reserve Online Pickup in Store (ROPIS), Click and Collect, Click and Deliver, Endless Aisle, Buy Online Return In-Store (BORIS) as well as a comprehensive view of the entire inventory and of customers in all channels. This is done through real-time integration of ETP’s POS, CRM and promotions engine with online stores and marketplaces using ETP Connect’s secure web services framework to easily view and manage order flows.
4. Use the right retail technology to create incredible customer moments
Having the right retail software tools available both in stores and at headquarters is essential to getting the right product to the right place at the right time in the right quantity. In fact, you can provide your customers with an improved shopping experience that makes them buy more, buy fast, and buy again! Retailers using integrated supply chain, POS, CRM, promotional planning and analytical tools gain business advantages in a competitive market as an effective channel/store business plan based on historical sales and economic scenarios (e.g. sales), seasons (festivals). Two of the most important software that every retailer should invest in are:
Point of Sale (POS): The benefits of innovative POS software for retail include very easy retail management, greatly simplifying daily operations. tasks such as maintaining customer information and purchase history, better marketing, inventory and loyalty management, easy payment, fast payments, secure payments and much, much more.
The last thing you want is for checkout to be slow and frustrating enough for the customer to leave the line and not buy anything. A faster POS workflow not only reduces wait time, but also allows employees to focus on customer engagement and potentially, generate more sales at checkout.
With an efficient and easy-to-use POS system, retailers can offer cross- and up-selling recommendations and persuade shoppers to buy other products to complement customers instead of messing around with unnecessary checkout processes.
Mobile POS (mPOS) System: Nothing beats buying things without even going to the checkout and waiting in line. Since there is a long line of shoppers at the checkout, why not use the opportunity to sell goods to those in line? The mPOS system opens up many possibilities – you can check stock on the go, search for suitable offers, buy additional products in order, maintain sufficient social distance in the store and carry out secure invoicing, which makes shopping easier and a truly memorable experience.
Shoppers who just want to grab a small item can quickly purchase it at counters specially equipped with the mPOS system. This means that shoppers who want to buy just one item won’t have to wait in line and can get in and out of the store faster. That way, the retailer can clear customers faster, maintain a healthy queue, boost inventory and keep shoppers happy.
5. Equip your store staff with the right retail tools and training
In stores in addition to products, staff are key to providing shoppers with a pleasant shopping experience. As the crowd grows, store employees must be trained not only for quick service and checkout, but also to know good products so they can help customers quickly. The information helps the store respond more effectively to customer questions and improve their shopping experience. This, in turn, helps control crowds and allows the store to serve more customers in less time, thus reducing the wait time for customers waiting to enter the store.
Considering the post-pandemic restrictions and requirements, employees must be trained in social distancing and handling products according to established regulations.
Consumers who find deals on their smartphones are more likely to redeem them in-store, making in-store promotional content more important than ever to mobile shoppers. However, a good offer found in the app can turn into a negative customer experience if frontline staff are not properly trained to help shoppers redeem the offer at the register. Training store employees on how to streamline the checkout process can be the best way to reverse sales directed to a competitor. Also, make sure that the store salespeople are well aware of the features and benefits of the product. Store employees must also be well versed in point of sale technology so they can serve customers faster.
All-in-1 ETP Retail POS Software – ETP Store – is easy to use, fast and reliable with touch screen technology – making it a proven retail POS solution that turns your store into a point of delight for both your end customers and your store staff.
Based on domain knowledge acquired through enabling several leading luxury and lifestyle retailers in the region to ensure the festive shopping season is merry and brilliant year after year, the ETP team has put together a series of articles that sheds light on the different factors that retailers such as you should focus on to upgrade your end customers’ omni-channel retail experience, win their loyalty, increase sales and of course, boost your holiday season profits!
ETP Group is a leading Unified Commerce Software company, with a 36 year track record of delivering enterprise class retail technology solutions. Market leading retailers in Asia Pacific use ETP across hundreds of thousands of employees, over 500 brands and across 24 countries.
ETP’s comprehensive AI powered solution suites, ETP Unify and Ordazzle, encompass a broad spectrum of e-commerce and retail functionality, from POS, CRM, OMS, PIM, Unified Inventory to Unified promotions, Logistics management and seamless integration with marketplaces and e-commerce platforms. ETP’s Unified Commerce Retail Platforms creates a frictionless and consistent shopping experience for consumers across all channels, wherever, whenever, and however they choose to shop.
ETP’s strength lies in its ability to provide robust and innovative retail solutions built with the most scalable and secure technology, MACH architecture and beautiful UI design. ETP’s “asset-light” solutions minimise IT administrative costs, enabling businesses to focus on growth and strategic initiatives.
