Tag: Customer relationship management

5 Game-Changing Advantages of Unified Commerce for Retailers

Posted on by Omprasad Devadiga

Today’s shoppers are no longer confined to a single channel. They browse online, compare prices in-store, and expect a seamless experience no matter how they interact with your brand. This omnichannel reality demands a retail approach that transcends the limitations of separate online and offline systems. Enter unified commerce: a revolutionary strategy that centralises the data you’ve collected about customers and products on a single platform. These platforms can interconnect systems of e-commerce, mobile commerce, customer relationship management, order management systems, omnichannel order fulfilment, analytics, and more to help provide insights into how to improve the customer experience. 

Unified Commerce aims to promote personalised shopping experiences that meet consumer expectations. It is necessary to align all the sales channels to offer the same information that the customer expects, ensure there is a constant flow of information being shared, and reduce data silos on a given channel.

This blog delves into the five game-changing advantages unified commerce offers retailers. 

But first, let’s discuss:

How does a unified commerce strategy differ from an omni-channel strategy?

Imagine shopping for a new jacket. You browse styles online, check in-store sizes, and order them for home delivery. But what if the store says the coat is out of stock online, even though you saw it on the website? Frustrating, right?

This is where a unified commerce platform comes in. It’s like having one big system for everything instead of separate ones for online and in-store shopping. Here’s how it’s different from what most stores do now:

Regular stores:  Think of them as islands. They might have different systems for online shopping and what happens in the store, and these systems don’t always talk to each other. This can lead to mistakes, like showing an item as out of stock when it’s actually on the shelf.

Unified commerce: It’s like a bridge connecting all the islands. This system keeps everything in sync, so you get the same information and experience no matter how you shop. You can see what’s in stock online and in-store, buy online and pick up at the store, or even return an online purchase in-store. It’s all smooth and connected.

In short, unified commerce gives you a single, seamless shopping experience across all channels, online or offline.

5 Game-Changing Advantages of Unified Commerce for Retailers

1. Enhanced Customer Experience

Unified commerce enables retailers to offer a seamless and personalized shopping experience to their customers across multiple channels, including online, mobile, social media, and physical stores. 

By consolidating customer data from various touchpoints into a single, centralized platform, retailers gain a 360-degree view of their customer’s preferences, behaviours, and purchase histories. This allows retailers to deliver targeted promotions, recommendations, and personalized experiences that resonate with individual customers, driving greater satisfaction and loyalty.

2. Increased Operational Efficiency

By integrating disparate systems and processes into a unified commerce platform, retailers streamline their operations and eliminate the inefficiencies associated with managing multiple systems and databases. 

Its solutions enable retailers to automate key processes such as inventory management, order fulfilment, and customer service, reducing manual errors and improving overall efficiency. This not only frees up valuable time and resources but also allows retailers to focus on strategic initiatives that drive growth and innovation.

3. Seamless Omnichannel Selling

Omnichannel retailing has become the new norm, with consumers expecting a consistent shopping experience across all channels. It enables retailers to seamlessly integrate their online and offline channels, allowing customers to browse, shop, and transact across multiple touchpoints with ease. 

Whether customers buy online and pick up in-store, browse products on a mobile app, or engage with a brand on social media, this ensures a frictionless experience regardless of their preferred channel.

4. Real-time Inventory Visibility

Inventory management is a critical aspect of retail operations, and a lack of visibility into inventory levels leads to stockouts, overstocking, and lost sales opportunities. Its solutions provide retailers with real-time visibility into their inventory across all channels and locations.

Enabling them to optimize inventory levels, minimize stockouts, and fulfil orders more efficiently. This not only improves customer satisfaction by ensuring product availability but also helps retailers reduce carrying costs and improve inventory turnover rates.

ETP’s Unified Commerce Platform gives you a single, clear view of everything you have in stock across all your sales channels. No more scrambling to find the right product. The Unified Inventory Management System keeps everything organized to ensure you have the right items available at the right place and time every time.

5. Data-Driven Insights and Decision-making

Its platforms generate a wealth of data from various customer interactions, transactions, and touchpoints, providing retailers with valuable insights into consumer behaviour, market trends, and business performance. By leveraging advanced analytics and reporting capabilities, retailers gain actionable insights that drive informed decision-making and strategic planning. 

Whether it’s identifying emerging trends, forecasting demand, or segmenting customers for targeted marketing campaigns, it empowers retailers to harness the power of data to drive growth and profitability.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it represents a paradigm shift in retailing, offering retailers a powerful and flexible platform. ETP offers an advanced Unified Commerce Strategy that empowers retailers to deliver seamless omnichannel experiences, streamline operations, and drive business growth. 

With a focus on enhancing the customer experience, increasing operational efficiency, and leveraging data-driven insights, ETP helps retailers stay ahead of the curve in today’s rapidly evolving retail landscape. By partnering with ETP, retailers unlock the full potential of unified commerce and achieve sustained success in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Empowering Retail Mobility with Mobile POS Software: Enhancing Sales and Customer Experience

Posted on by Omprasad Devadiga

Today’s retail environment requires mobility to succeed. Retailers must fulfil the expectations of their customers, who want the freedom to buy whenever and however they like. Retailers may empower their staff members and enhance customer experience using mobile POS software.

The Following Are Some Advantages Of Utilising Mobile Pos Software:

Increased sales:

By enabling staff to accept payments anywhere in the business, mobile POS software can aid companies in boosting sales. This can free up cashiers at the front of the business to concentrate on serving customers. Retailers who want to track sales data in real time and make educated decisions regarding inventory and promotions can benefit from mobile POS software.

Improved customer experience:

Mobile POS software can help retailers improve the customer experience by providing a more personalised shopping experience. Employees can use mobile POS software to look up product information, recommend products, and process payments. This can help customers feel more valued and appreciated.

Reduced costs:

Mobile POS software can help retailers lower costs by eliminating the need for traditional cash registers. Mobile POS software can also help retailers save money on labor costs by allowing employees to work from anywhere in the store.

Mobile POS software is a great option if you’re looking for a way to empower your employees and improve the customer experience. Many different mobile POS software solutions are available, so you can find one that fulfils your specific needs.

Choosing the Best Mobile POS Software to Use

A mobile point of sale (POS) software solution is crucial for businesses trying to optimise their operations and improve the customer experience in today’s hectic retail climate. With so many options available, it’s crucial for shops to carefully evaluate a few things before choosing the best mobile POS software for their unique requirements. The following are important things to bear in mind:

Store Size and Layout:

The kind of mobile POS software you should select depends a lot on the size and layout of your store. Consider whether you operate a tiny boutique, a sizable retail space, or a pop-up store. In order to accommodate the necessary checkout points and meet the layout of your store, a mobile POS software system should be scaleable and adaptable.

Product Types:

Different companies offer a range of goods, from groceries and electronics to apparel and accessories. Make sure the mobile POS software you use can handle the exact products you offer. It should manage variants like sizes and colours and various pricing structures and effectively track inventories.

Integration Capabilities:

It’s critical to pick a simple mobile POS software solution to link with other retail systems to streamline operations and get a comprehensive view of your organisation. Real-time inventory tracking and automatic product replenishment are made possible by integration with inventory management software. You may track consumer information and deliver individualised experiences by integrating with customer relationship management (CRM) software.

Ease of Use:

A user-friendly interface is essential when choosing a mobile POS software solution. Your staff members should be able to learn the system quickly and do jobs effectively. Look for layouts that can be customised, easy-to-use functions, and intuitive navigation. The programme should have a low learning curve to reduce training time and ensure efficient operations even during peak usage.

Updates and Support:

Take into account the degree of support offered by the programme manufacturer. Do they provide technical support and troubleshooting? Do they provide frequent updates to fix any bugs or security flaws? Strong customer service guarantees that any problems may be fixed quickly, minimising inconveniences to your business.

Conclusion:

Choosing the best mobile POS software necessitates carefully taking into account variables, including the store size, product types, employee management, budget, integration capabilities, the convenience of use, and support. Increase operational effectiveness, enhance customer experiences, and spur growth in your retail business by weighing these variables and choosing a solution that matches your unique business needs.

ETP Mobile POS software is a valuable tool that can aid merchants in enhancing productivity, customer satisfaction, and sales. Retailers may empower their staff members and give consumers a smooth and convenient shopping experience.

Enhancing Retail Operations with Advanced Retail Software Solutions

Posted on by Omprasad Devadiga

In the fast-paced world of retail, staying competitive requires efficient and streamlined operations. Traditional manual processes can be time-consuming, error-prone, and hinder growth. Fortunately, advanced retail software solutions have emerged to revolutionize the industry. This article explores the benefits of leveraging retail software to enhance various aspects of retail operations, from inventory management to customer relationship management, ultimately helping businesses thrive in today’s competitive marketplace.

Streamline Inventory Management:

Retail software offers robust inventory management capabilities that streamline the entire process. With real-time inventory tracking, businesses can avoid overstocking or stockouts, reducing costs and improving customer satisfaction. Advanced software can automate inventory replenishment, generate accurate demand forecasts, and integrate with suppliers’ systems for seamless stock ordering. With these features, businesses can optimize inventory levels, minimize carrying costs, and ensure products are always available for customers.

Improve Point of Sale (POS) Efficiency:

Efficient POS operations are crucial for providing a smooth and enjoyable shopping experience. Retail software solutions provide advanced POS functionalities that go beyond traditional cash registers. Modern POS systems are equipped with barcode scanning, integrated payment processing, and real-time inventory synchronization. These features enable faster transactions, reduce errors, and provide customers with accurate product information and pricing. By improving the efficiency of your POS operations, you can enhance customer satisfaction and boost sales.

Enhance Customer Relationship Management (CRM):

Retail software solutions offer robust CRM capabilities that help businesses build and maintain strong customer relationships. These solutions can centralize customer data, including purchase history, preferences, and contact information, allowing businesses to personalize their interactions. By leveraging CRM tools, businesses can create targeted marketing campaigns, implement loyalty programs, and deliver personalized promotions based on customer preferences. Effective CRM through retail software leads to improved customer satisfaction, increased loyalty, and higher customer lifetime value.

Optimize Supply Chain Management:

Managing a complex supply chain is a challenge for many retailers. Advanced retail software solutions provide comprehensive supply chain management capabilities, facilitating better coordination and visibility. These solutions automate and streamline key supply chain operations from procurement and vendor management to order fulfilment and logistics. By optimizing supply chain management, businesses can reduce costs, improve order accuracy, and enhance operational efficiency.

Utilize Business Intelligence and Analytics:

Data is a goldmine for retailers, and retail software solutions excel in providing robust business intelligence and analytics tools. These tools enable businesses to analyze sales data, customer behaviour, and market trends, empowering data-driven decision-making. By gaining actionable insights from retail software analytics, businesses can identify opportunities, optimize pricing strategies, identify top-performing products, and forecast demand accurately. Data-driven decision-making allows businesses to stay agile, make informed choices, and gain a competitive edge in the market.

Automate Back-Office Operations:

Administrative tasks such as payroll, accounting, and HR can be time-consuming and prone to errors if done manually. Retail software solutions automate these back-office operations, streamlining processes and reducing manual effort. By integrating with accounting software, payroll systems, and HR management tools, retail software can automate tasks like employee scheduling, payroll processing, and financial reporting. Automation frees up time for staff to focus on more strategic activities, improving efficiency and reducing costs.

Embrace Omnichannel Capabilities:

In today’s retail landscape, offering a seamless omnichannel experience is crucial. Advanced retail software solutions enable businesses to seamlessly integrate multiple sales channels, such as online stores, brick-and-mortar locations, and mobile apps. This integration allows customers to browse, purchase, and return products across channels, providing a consistent and convenient experience. Retail software solutions also enable unified inventory management, ensuring accurate stock visibility across all channels and minimizing the chances of stockouts or overselling.

Conclusion:

In an era of fierce competition, leveraging advanced retail software solutions is essential for enhancing retail operations. By streamlining inventory management, improving POS efficiency, enhancing CRM capabilities, optimizing supply chain management, utilizing business intelligence and analytics, automating back-office operations, and embracing omnichannel capabilities, businesses can unlock new levels of operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and profitability. Adapt to ETP retail software and take your business to new heights in today’s dynamic retail landscape.

Retail is all about the value and its perceptions

Posted on by admin

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Customers are the king and queen in retail and they are valuable to the business. On the flip-side, customers are also seeking value in what is being offered to them. Retail brands across the globe are fiercely pegged against each other in this value game, and the one who offers the best value as perceived the customer will be the clear winner.

Let’s try to understand this better. In this day and age of technology driving the industry towards innovation and disruption, there is no ambiguity anymore in the current and future roadmap for retail businesses to survive and thrive. One thing is clear, the retail brands who standout on their customer experience expectations will taste success. However it is important to understand the customer experience paradigm.

Traditionally, retail was transactional and product focused, but that is no more the case. As the focus of the business pivots on the customer, the customer experience paradigm has undergone a significant shift since the early retail days. This shift has largely been the result of technology enabling customers equipping themselves with more information and decision making power, thus putting them in the driver’s seat who are now calling the shots. Fundamentally, the customer experience is all about the value the customer perceives in two ways – i) their interactions with the retail brands, and ii) the offerings they receive from those brands in terms of products/services. Thus, it all boils down to the value the customer receives from their relationship with the retail business.

For retail brands, the best part is that now they have multiple opportunities to provide perceivable value to their customers. As retail has moved from transaction focused to being more customer centric and other factors have influenced the sector big-time, the shopping journey has evolved. Here is where retail brands can seize their opportunities to establish their value offerings. For example, while the customer is researching, a retail company can provide the necessary information that the customer seeks, even though the customer is not seeking information with the intention of purchase. Another example is where a customer can be offered an additional discount while their product is replaced due to issues in the products they had initially purchased. These are some of the many instances of how retailers can offer value – either qualitative or quantitative. These valued offerings will cement the brand-customer relationships in the long-run and thus prove to be a mutual benefit for both the retail company and the customer.

Build long-lasting relationships with your customers

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Traditionally, shopping as an activity was highly transactional, but today it is an exciting journey. Earlier, shopping seemed to be simple and straightforward. But today, it has gotten complex because every step in the journey involves multiple touchpoints available for retailers and customers to interact. However, from an optimist’s point of view, there is an opportunity for retailers to capitalize on this complexity.

Being at the epicenter of the retail business, every retail owner is trying to woo the customers in order to grab their maximum span of attention and maximum share of wallet. Customer experience has therefore become the ultimate battleground for retailers to compete. To be better than the other, retailers are trying all sort of tactics to be able to deliver the best customer experience to win and sustain them. And while many retail companies are in this rat race to strike big with their customers, only a handful are getting it right.

The reason for such a circumstance is obvious and yet highly overlooked. Simply put, the main cause for retailers failing to get their customers to stick is that they haven’t taken efforts to get the basics right. Fundamentally, it is the relationship that the retail brand shares with its customers. The stronger the foundation, the longer the relationship will last. Customers prefer to do business with brands that they can relate with and retailers therefore, need to build long-lasting relationships with their customers.

Being constantly connected with their customer is one way a retail business can help in fortifying the relationship. Staying connected effectively means that the brand needs to be available and ready to fulfil the customers’ needs be it for a product or for information, whenever and wherever the customer wants it. By seamlessly integrating together the various touchpoints a consumer might use to engage, retail owners can leverage and optimize the data from these engagements to plan and design a strategy that is most likely to resonate with that particular shopper.

Another surefire technique to strike the right chord with customers is personalization. Basically, it is the ability of a retail company to know their customer by name and also be able to approach them with a personalized set of communication. This will allow the brand to strengthen their customer relationship by demonstrating that they “know” the shopper’s preferences well. Personalization can ensure cementing the consumer’s loyalty in the retail business thus sustaining their confidence in the brand, making it a preferred choice.

Being connected to the customer will enable retail brands to understand their customer and deliver personalized offerings. This combination allows retailers to not only extend exceptional customer experience, but also it is a must to forge and fortify brand-customer relationships to ensure that their customers continue to stick to the brand.

CRM Is A Two-Way Street In Retail

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Customer Relationship Management (CRM), as the name suggests, is primarily a customer-centric tool. But, it does have a multi-pronged effect on key business functions, proving to be the catalyst in organically evolving and optimizing retail planning and processes. Retail CRM helps retailers service, retain and grow their customer base.

The foremost and elemental expectation from a Retail CRM tool is to create more demand. It provides the necessary insights about the customer – her buying capacity, behavior or her preferences on products and promotions. It is no surprise then that many retail companies have begun implementing CRM programs in to the business. The promise of retaining and growing customer base through CRM is realized by these methods:

Loyalty programs: Global reports have shown that retailers can raise profits by 75% by retaining just 5% of the current customer-base. So, loyalty programs, if effectually planned and sustained, can be a substantial growth driving tool within the business. These programs can be planned to stay nimble as per the business objectives – to acquire more customers and make them stick, to increase transaction value from current base and to cultivate brand loyalty as a prestige token through preferential treatment.

Promotions: CRM based metrics help retailers evaluate their marketing campaigns and promotions. It applies the base of a seamless rewards and recognition program that can be automated and promoted through multiple channels. Determining the right channels for the promotions forms part of the strategy which can be allocated as per promotion phase, budget or target demographics. The promotions can be analyzed real-time to be revised or reinforced, basis customer feedback.

Personalized Offerings: This is perhaps the most significant part of retail CRM technology, albeit used inadequately, due to high dependency on external factors like trained staff, complete stock visibility, back-end system integration with real-time CRM information, etc. If these dependencies are adequately resolved, the retailer can break down his customer data and identify servicing factors which distinguish him from the competition. He can understand the product, payment, timing preferences and demographic details based on location, age, gender, race, etc. This information is worth its weight in gold, if employed successfully and executed perfectly towards providing superior shopping experiences.

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While increasing the demand side of the business remains sacrosanct, the course of action to achieve the same is subject to further correction. Most retailers reward the wrong customers and deprive the right ones by presenting equal or average service value to both.

With a powerful Retail CRM Software integrated across all operations, the retailers can have a 360° view of all business functions such as Omni-Channel and E-commerce, intuitive POS, Mobility, Daily Reports & Analytics, Social Media, Customer Support, Loyalty Programs, Promotions and Marketing Campaigns, which hold the potential to creating the desired demand from the right customer community.

At the same time, the customers’ expectations for a more delightful and better rewarding, personable experience and value will only increase through their consumption cycle with a retailer, making the transaction of knowledge and experience a two-way street.

Emerging technology is making it possible for retailers to match performance with desired pace in all channels across the globe. Cloud computing and marketing ensures that the process data shows the ‘one version of truth’ with real-time ease. Mobility in-store and online applications further provide the convenience and incentive to simply click, choose and buy. Through a powerful and engaging social media connect, brands can capture the most coveted real estate in retail – the customer’s mind. All these technological measures help improve the shopping experience, increase the brand equity and also keep feeding additional data to the CRM solution equipping it with the ability to harness potential with strategic speed.

The above points illustrate how CRM is a comprehensive tool, which can be used to not just grow the business but also to support it to stay competitive, apply sharper focus and merge the art of customer engagement with the science of derived business value.