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As the festive season is in progress, there is a lot retailers can do to bank more sales and boost profits as much as possible. The key is to be proactively prepared. If retail businesses expect to grab larger portions of the festive shopping cake, it is up to the retailers to take charge and make it happen.

1. Have enough product inventory on hand
   Plan for sufficient buffer stock to meet the targeted sales volume for the season. Keep the warehouse inventory handy and the display amply stocked so that customers feel spoilt for choice. Implementing the right type of omni-channel retail software with a unified inventory solution such as the ETP Omni-channel Retail Solutions and Unified Inventory Management solution can help to tackle this issue quite comfortably. The Endless Aisle function which ETP’s solutions offer further aids to avoid stock out and lost sale situations by presenting the inventory carried by the brand’s nearby stores and local and/or regional warehouses to the shoppers on a single screen.

2. Focus on cross-selling and upselling
   Identify which potential products can be coupled for sales to add value to a sale (cross-selling) and products that have big-ticket or upgraded models that can be suggested for customers to consider (up-selling). Slow-moving items can be offered as complementary products or repackaged as a special buy in combination with best-sellers to get the slow movers out of the door. ETP’s in-POS CRM coupled with its uber stable promotions engine, ETP Accelerator can together facilitate to cross/up-sell to customers while they wait in the queue either outside the store or at the checkout counter. A suitable mPOS solution such as the ETP Mobile Store further enables retailers to execute the additional sales by offering quick product lookup, line discounts, quick billing and loyalty points’ accrual, and queue busting in the store.

3. Deck the stores to be a “happy place” to encourage sales
   Highlight the most distinctive features of the mainstream merchandise with the right communication or offer some new and unique products that cannot be found elsewhere, to attract the attention of curious customers looking for the latest in the season. Set the festive ambiance at the stores with the right paraphernalia to match the season – merchandise displays, lighting, colours, music, and other means to delight customers. Focus on creating a space that is shopper-friendly.

4. Know your customer
   The festive season will bring in new customers. Know what customers are really looking for in terms of shopping experience in the festive season. Take the time and effort to ask questions and receive actionable feedback from all channels. Understand the demographics of the region and choose your product offerings accordingly. Capture every customer’s data in your CRM. Further, track and analyze their buying behavior and preferences to spot which products are trending up and which are getting eluded to be able to personalize offerings and boost loyalty.

5. Make training your store staff a priority
   Consumers who find deals on their smartphones are quite likely to redeem them in-store, making in-store promotional content more important than ever for mobile shoppers. However, a good deal found on an app can turn into a negative customer experience if frontline employees aren’t properly trained to help shoppers redeem an offer at the register. Training store employees on how to make the redemption process frictionless can be the best way to reverse the trend of sales moving to a competitor. Moreover, make sure in-store salespeople know the product features and benefits thoroughly. Store staff should also be well versed with the technology at the counters to be able to service customers faster.
   The All-in-1 ETP Retail POS software – ETP Store – is user-friendly, fast, and reliable with touch-screen technology – making it a proven retail POS solution that transforms your point-of-sale into a point-of-delight for both your end customers and your store staff.

6. Manage finances to last the season
   Plan the pre-season stock allocation and in-season procurement of inventory to last through the entire festive shopping season, which is starting earlier and lasting longer each year. This makes it crucial to handle budgets accordingly.

7. Secure your payment card data at the point-of-sale
   With a plethora of transactions taking place due to the rise in shopping activity during the festive season, it is necessary to protect shoppers’ payment card data and ensure secure transactions across channels. Retailers must take measures to make payment card transactions safe for customers, no matter which channel they use for their festive gift shopping, by employing a payment application that helps you do just that by protecting the heart of the festive shopping experience – the transaction.
   The ETP Store solution integrates with a wide range of payment systems electronically, including all the well-known credit, debit, and cash cards, PayPal, and NFCs such as online payment systems (online wallets) and mobile payment systems (mobile wallets). The ETP Omni-channel Retail Suite consisting of omni-channel retail solutions is certified as Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS) v3.2 compliant by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC). In order to ensure that all sensitive cardholder authentication data is secure, PCI requires merchants, banks, and all other parties to use a third-party application that meets the PA-DSS standard for processing payments. The use of compliant software solutions is a key element of demonstrating their ability to protect sensitive card data. Being compliant with the security standards, ETP makes it easier for its customers around the world to apply for PCI PA-DSS certification.

8. Plan for the last-minute frenzy
   Employ the right skills and technologies to handle in-store as well as online traffic on the e-commerce website. Keep the supply chain engine running through the season to ensure sufficient stock is always handy through careful planning and allocation of stocks across all retail touchpoints.

9. Transcend your customer experience to a superior, amazing one
   Focus on customer centricity by understanding customers better and then servicing them accordingly. Employ technologies to enhance customer service particularly during peak business periods and to ensure safe transactions. Unify your retail processes by integrating your omnichannel retail software solutions with your inventory management, order management and fulfilment, and product information management systems. It gives you a single view of your customers, one version of the truth of your inventory helps to secure all your payment transactions, and to gain better control over your logistics and order deliveries. Enhanced customer experience can help induce repeat purchases, increase festive sales and profits, create brand loyalists out of your regular customers, and make you stand apart from the competition.

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The luxury and lifestyle retail industry has always set high standards for itself when it comes to extending outstanding customer service. It is this service and shopping experience that keeps the customers coming back for more. But what exactly goes into providing a truly superior experience?

The holiday season in particular always brings in waves of shoppers both online and offline that lead to a large number of exciting promotions, massive sales, and increased revenue often also result in long queues, longer checkout processing wait-time, stock-out situations, and lost sales. With COVID restrictions further complicating the experiences at the stores, it is important for retailers to be proactive about utilizing the right retail technology that helps to not only avoid any of the aforementioned unpleasant situations but also boost the holiday season profits.

In this write-up, which is the concluding piece of our series on how retailers can actually deliver an amazing customer experience, we throw light on how innovative retail software solutions and the associated benefits can do just that! Here are some ways in which you can “upgrade” your customers’ experience in your store:

• Unify your retail commerce processes

Apart from quality products, customers usually seek a pleasant store ambiance, easy access to merchandise with correct labels be it wherever, whenever, or however they may choose to access it from, promotions and offers that are tailored to their requirements, and helpful, well-informed staff as part of the overall in-store experience.

Unfortunately, these are often independent departments, functioning in silos and the data collected from each of them cannot be analyzed together in a unified manner, thus effectively reducing its value. To work around this and make optimum use of all the data obtained from the different segments, you need to unify your retail processes. Unified commerce solutions involve unifying your omnichannel retail software solutions along with inventory management, order management and fulfilment, and product information management systems. It gives you a single view of your customers, one version of the truth of your inventory helps to secure all your payment transactions, and to gain better control over your logistics and order deliveries.

This will transcend the level of customer experience you are delivering to a truly superior one.

• Have a mobile POS (mPOS) system 

This holiday season, move the queues super quick so you can sell more. Implementing an mPOS system in your stores will allow your staff to help customers scan their purchases swiftly and check out faster without even having to wait in the queue. This is particularly helpful for the store staff to assist customers with smaller purchases who can be in and out of the store in a quick manner. This helps reduce the crowd in-store and maintain safe distancing, allowing you to maintain the COVID-induced restrictions and sell more while attending to more customers within the same time.

Having an mPOS system would also mean that you can register your customers into your CRM/loyalty management system right outside the store and they are able to enter the store, purchase quickly, and start earning loyalty points. This allows you to engage shoppers waiting in the queue to enter the store and potentially drive higher sales using the mPOS system. 

This divide and delight strategy will help ease the in-store crowding significantly and customers will not have to wait too long to pay for their items, keeping them happy and allowing them to have a great impression of your store.

• Introduce BOPIS

BOPIS, i.e., buy online and pick-up in-store – this strategy allows customers to make purchases online and hop over to your store to grab the items. They may even be queueing outside another store that is not BOPIS enabled while purchasing your products so that they can grab and go afterward. 

With this, customers will be able to have the instant gratification of getting the items instantaneously without having to queue for them. Reserve online, pick-up in-store and click & collect are features very similar to BOPIS that can also be enabled with the help of the right omni-channel retail software solutions.

• Provide Curbside Pickup

Retailers can also set up pick-up points outside the store to facilitate fast pickups and reduce the queues. In this way, customers who purchase online can pick it up faster while avoiding having to wait in line in the store.

All in all, this holiday season, it is important for stores to stand out from the crowd and offer unique ways of shopping such that shoppers will feel at ease and have a more pleasant time shopping. This will encourage them to return to your store in the future and thus build brand/store loyalty.

• Offer Endless Aisle functionality

Limited shelf space? No problem! With technology nowadays, it is easy to list your entire inventory across stores and at warehouses online. Even with customers that are unfamiliar with your store, you are able to showcase all there is to them on a single screen. 

During the holiday season especially, it is common to see empty shelves and frustrated shoppers. Store staff is unable to restock the shelves in time and that leaves the shoppers unfulfilled and unsatisfied because they made a wasted trip down to the store. With an endless aisle feature, stores are no longer limited by the shelf space. Store staff is able to approach shoppers and offer them suggestions that are not on the shelves allowing them to view the entire inventory and choose from there. Then if the inventory is not in-store, the sales associate can order the products for home delivery from the store on the same screen.

Thus having an endless aisle option allows for the in-store customers to view the entire inventory across all your stores and warehouses and pick out the item either to be shipped to their homes or reserve it for pick up another time. Buyers get more than they expected and this will increase the shoppers’ satisfaction.

• Initiate Ship from store

With the Ship From Store (SFS) fulfilment technique, you can transform your stores into virtual distribution hubs that use stock from the physical store estate to fulfil both online & offline orders by leveraging inventory held in physical stores & making it available for sale through the eCommerce channels.

• Enable hassle-free anywhere exchanges and returns

Extend an enhanced customer service to your end customers where they can buy products online and return/exchange them at the nearest store, or they can buy in-store and trigger an online return/exchange.

• Have an e-commerce presence

All the previous options are all related to the physical storefront. What if you have a fully digital option where shoppers are able to shop online and have the goods delivered right to their doorstep? In this way, you can reduce the number of customers in the stores and may even potentially have more sales online because the customers are not limited by the number of items they can carry!

At the onset of the holiday season, it is important for your business to be ready for the different types of shoppers that will walk through your store doors or browse through your e-commerce sites. Knowing your customers well is the key to retail success. Consumer behaviour is an important factor to consider when preparing your business, particularly your store for a festive opening and these steps will help you figure out the shopper personas with ease and plan your promotions for each one of them.

• Figure out your typical buyer personas

Buyer personas are pseudo representations of your ideal customers based on extensive research and data collection. They help you focus your retail marketing efforts on qualified target audiences and prospective customers. As a result, you’ll be able to attract high-value visitors, leads, and customers to your business who you’ll be more likely to retain over time. From your existing pool of buyers, figure out the most common personas to uncover trends about how certain leads or customers find and consume your content and/or respond to your promotions. How old are they, their gender, where do they live, which income group they belong to, and so on.   

After identifying who these people are, the next step is to understand their typical buying behaviour in your store or on your website/marketplace.

• Find out what items do they typically buy, how much, and how often (Recency-Frequency-Monetary value or RFM Analysis)

Leading to the next point, look at their purchases and figure out the objective of their purchases. Are they buying for themselves or others? Especially during the holiday season, what type of gifts are they adding to their shopping carts, both online and offline? Are they buying for an office gift exchange, for friends, family, or their partners? How often do they buy products that you sell? What is their average basket/ticket size? And, so on.   Different types of shoppers will exhibit varying budgets and different product purchases. This will help you see what inventory to stock up and how your staff is able to give sound recommendations. 

Based on the research data for the above two points, you’d be able to create various buyer personas such as Decisive/Commanding, Collaborative, Outgoing, Sceptical, Analytical, and Easy going. Using the right kind of omni-channel retail software, you will be able to design your marketing promotions to suit each persona, build and manage your loyalty programs, and offer them a variety of speedy order fulfilment options to suit their needs.

Typically, shoppers like to browse/explore several products and take their time shopping. During the festive season, we all know that shoppers want to get their festive shopping done as soon as possible. But they also look for the best promotions and offers suitable to them. Stores are also in a rush to clear as many shoppers as possible so that they can clear their stock and hit the KPIs for the year. So how then do we go about speeding up the process?

• Personalize gift ideas, festive promotions, and discount offers

Make use of all the online and offline data you’ve collected throughout the year and send your existing customers a curated list of gift ideas, festive promotions, and offers. Not only does this show that your brand cares for its customers, but it also reduces the time they need to think about what to buy next. They can spend more time browsing and buying/adding to their wish list more items from your shop.

The personalized promotions pique the interest of the customers and the discounts/offers essentially encourage them to buy more!

With ETP’s Promotion Planning tool, ETP Accelerator, you can roll out promotions specific to buyer personas or customer segments as well as easily define the business rules based on merchandise, time, and location.

• Extend your digital-channel presence and increase customer engagement

81% of retail shoppers conduct online research before buying. The overwhelming majority of retail consumers start their journey with online research. The majority of these searches occur on mobile devices (nearly 77%), since retail shoppers frequently research competitor products and pricing in-store. App downloads increased greatly during the pandemic and a vast majority of the retailer fraternity has planned to prioritize a retail mobility or mPOS solution to transcend the omnichannel customer experience their brand offers and to be present where your customers are and when they are looking to purchase.

• Use loyalty marketing to boost holiday season profits

Many stores are looking at growing their customer base to generate more revenue this festive shopping season. More customers equals more revenue, right? Yes, in some sense that is the truth. However, if you are not retaining your customers and the outflow of customers is equal to, if not larger than the incoming new customers, not only will you not grow your revenue, you might even be losing revenue! So, what should you do to retain your customer base? Loyalty is the key; here are some ways you can work on your loyalty programs in the festive season. 

1. Reward all paying customers: During this festive season, it is important that stores pay attention to all customers and try to capture their value as much as possible. Instead of letting customers go through a lengthy sign-up process or have to download an app just to redeem rewards and potentially lose their interest in signing up for any loyalty programs, issue a Mobile POS (mPOS) in-store to equip store staff to be able to register the customers instantly and gain rewards for their purchases. This way, the customers might be incentivized to purchase more gifts from your store just to redeem the rewards! 
2. Understand how customers want to be rewarded: Some stores offer cash rebates as loyalty rewards, others offer a little gift or just a priority to an exclusive item. Rewards for loyalty programs can come in many shapes and types. However, a little research needs to go into how customers would like to be rewarded for their continued purchases from your store. Especially during the festive season, many customers may be looking for cash rebates for their gift purchases. As they are buying in large quantities for gift exchanges for family, colleagues, and friends, they might be looking to save so that they can stretch their dollars to buy more gifts. Act accordingly and offer them that!
3. Develop personalized loyalty programs: Nothing beats having a personalized loyalty program that shows the customers that they are being valued and taken care of. Knowing your customers’ buying behaviour will inadvertently allow you to know what sort of rewards and programs they are looking for. No one program will be suitable for all customers. So dig out the data and start to tailor the loyalty system to individuals so that they will be more likely to think of your store when they want to make their next purchase. Especially now when they are shopping for themselves or for others, it is a great time to see their buying behaviours and figure out the customer buying journey.
4. Allow real-time earning and burning of loyalty points: In today’s world of instant gratification, customers will not wait to earn and burn their loyalty points. Therefore, it is important to implement loyalty programs with features such as ETP’s In-POS Earn & Burn that allows your customers to instantly accumulate loyalty points through both their online as well as offline (in-store) purchases. They can then redeem these points in real-time (in the same purchase transaction) for shopping across all channels, thus enhancing their shopping experience.

In the after-effects of the pandemic, as we move further away from fear and anxiety towards a holiday season that is filled with hope, bounce back and fully vaccinated retail staff as well as fully vaccinated shoppers, even with the rise in online purchases, there is undoubtedly going to be an increased footfall in the retail stores in preparation of the gift-giving season. 

Through much of last year (2020) and a greater part of the beginning of this year (2021), given the Covid restrictions, many stores had a limit as to how many customers can be in store at a given point in time. With many of these restrictions being relaxed globally this holiday season, there is a need for brands to be ready to tackle large crowds and long lines at the checkout counters resulting in frustrations and potential loss of sales during a potential peak period.

A recent case of concern was when a leading footwear store had its flagship store closed due to the breaching of COVID restrictions during a product launch which drew huge crowds outside the store despite the advisories on crowd management. Nobody wanted this to happen, but it did!

So how do you get your retail business including the stores, your brand.com, marketplaces, mobile apps, etc. to be ready to welcome the holiday season shoppers and give them access to your products, payment methods, and order fulfilment options from wherever they please and whenever they please while offering them great service and amazing shopping experiences? There are a few ways that brands can adopt to tackle the basics while reopening stores, and potentially improving customer experience and sales. 

• Get your store staff trained and ready

In stores, other than the products, the staff is crucial in giving the shopper a pleasant shopping experience. With increased crowds, the store staff needs to be trained to not only be quick in their service and checkout but there is a need for them to be good in their product knowledge so that they are able to assist customers promptly. The knowledge will help the store to be more efficient in tending to customers’ queries and improve their shopping experience. This in turn helps to manage the crowd and allows the store to serve more customers within a shorter amount of time, decreasing the wait time for customers waiting to enter the store. 

Keeping Covid restrictions and requisites in mind, the staff needs to be trained to handle social distancing and product handling as per policies set up. Having masks and hand sanitizers handy is mandatory and certainly goes a long way.

• Give your staff robust and easy-to-use retail software solutions

Deploying the right retail software tools both in-stores and at the head office is crucial for getting the right product at the right time to the right place in the right quantities, and in effect, empowering you to offer an enhanced shopping experience to your customers that makes them buy more, buy fast and buy again! Retailers who leverage an integrated supply chain, POS, CRM, Promotion Planning, and Analytics tools stand to gain in a competitive market from business benefits such as efficient business plan for channel/store based on historical sales and the economic scenario, for example ‘sales during seasons (festivals)’. Some of the most important software that every retailer must invest in are:

      1)       Point of Sale (POS)

Benefits of an innovative POS software for your retail business notably include making it extremely easy to manage your retail business by significantly simplifying daily business tasks such as maintaining customer details and buying history, better promotion, inventory, and loyalty management, simple invoicing, quick checkouts, secure payments and many, many more.

The last thing you want is for the checkout to be slow and frustrating for the customer enough to leave the queue and not buy anything. Having a faster POS workflow not only reduces wait time but also allows employees to concentrate on engaging the shopper and potentially selling more through the checkout process. 

With an efficient and easy-to-use POS system, instead of fumbling around with unnecessary checkout processes, retail store staff will be able to offer cross-selling and up-selling recommendations and convince the shoppers to purchase other items to complement the customers’ original purchases. 

      2)       Mobile POS (mPOS) system

Nothing beats being able to purchase items without even going to the checkout counter and queuing up. Since there will be a long line of shoppers at the checkout counters, why not make use of the opportunity to sell items to the people in the queue? Having an mPOS system opens up a lot of opportunities – inventory can be checked on the go, applicable promotions can be looked up, additional items can be purchased while waiting in the queue, adequate social distancing can be maintained in-store, and secure billing can be completed making the shopping experience a truly memorable one. 

Shoppers who just want to grab a small item are able to purchase it quickly from dedicated counters that have the mPOS system in place. Meaning, shoppers who just want to buy a single item would not have to wait in line and can be in and out of the store faster. This allows the retailer to clear customers faster, maintain a healthy queue, have a quicker inventory turnover, and keep the shoppers happy.

• Give your shoppers any time access to goods

Making the transition from traditional retail to being an omni-channel retailer during this festive shopping season while the pandemic is still around, makes it hassle-free for stores to limit the number of people in the store and in the checkout queues, and yet improve the store’s revenue and get more sales while still maintaining good COVID practices.

Buy Online Pickup In-Store (BOPIS) or click and collect is something that is up and coming around the world. It is important for shoppers who are not able to head to the shops during office hours to be able to still browse and pay for the items and pick up the item when it is convenient. 

This allows customers to purchase items online without even stepping into the store and mingling with other shoppers. This arrangement will free up the store to allow other shoppers to enter and it will help the store to not lose sales due to COVID restrictions and impatient or anxious customers. 

• Wider product offerings

Given the store’s limited capacity and limited shelf space, it is difficult for all the products to be displayed in-store. Having the endless aisle option will open up the ability for customers to view the entire inventory and pick out items either to be shipped to their homes or reserve them for picking up another time. 

This opens up more choices for customers to choose from, while at the same time keeping the number of shoppers low in stores. Endless aisle will also allow staff to have a clearer view of the availability of items. They are able to provide prompt alternatives and offer other options to shoppers when stocks run out, saving time from checking the inventory physically.

• Bring in online data

If you have an online/omni-channel presence, the data you collect online is also very valuable. The online buying behaviour may be different from that in the stores. Hence, it is important for you to analyse the online data to figure out how to properly promote and structure the online purchases. 

The online purchase behaviour can also be a piece of additional information for in-store buying behaviour – it can show you what are the typical items that are purchased together and this might help you figure out your store planogram – that is, deciding which inventory to prioritise when planning the display on your shelves.

Successful retailers know their customers (almost) personally. Not only do they know what the customers are buying and what they want to purchase, but also their behaviour outside the store such as their hobbies and interests, important milestones, etc. By analysing all that information, they are able to provide stellar customer experiences across all channels, particularly in-store. Stores are aware that the day they stop knowing their customer is the day they lose that customer. 

It is definitely a difficult time for retailers during this festive season in the aftermath of the pandemic. However, it is also an opportunity for retailers to show their customers the adaptability and ingenuity of the store and impress them positively.