The Economic Times Great India Retail Summit (GIRS) 2024 – India’s largest retail intelligence event – is being held at The Westin Mumbai Powai Lake, India on 15th & 16th February 2024. This exceptional two-day live event is poised to reshape the course of the Indian retail landscape. Bringing together leaders from every corner of the retail world, this conference and summit is a gathering of ambitions, innovations, and forward-thinking. With representation from diverse sectors, including FMCG giants, retailers, e-commerce leaders, D2C pioneers, policymakers, industrialists, industry experts, and technology solution providers, it promises an unmatched exchange of ideas.
ETP is the Omni-channel Technology Partner at #ETGIRS2024.
ETP Group is a leading Retail Software Solutions company with a 35 year track record of delivering top-of-the line retail technology products across 24 countries in Asia Pacific. ETP’s strength lies in its ability to provide robust and innovative retail solutions built with the latest technology, architecture and design. ETP V5 includes omni-channel modules like POS, CRM, Promotions, and Analytics so you can drive more traffic to stores, have a higher fulfilment percentage, and gain customer loyalty.
The “Great India Retail Summit 2024 (ETGIRS)” stands ready to script a new chapter in the annals of commerce. Prepare to embark on a journey where aspirations meet action, where innovations shape industries, and where the future of retail is not just imagined – it’s realized.
Do meet the ETP team at the ET Great India Retail Summit & Awards 2024 to know more about how ETP can help you in elevating your retail performance and e-commerce business. Connect with us to gain insights on how to kick-off your journey to creating amazing customer experiences!
Point of Sale (POS) software has undergone significant advancements in recent years, revolutionizing how businesses manage sales, inventory, and customer interactions. As we step into the final quarter of 2023 with the festive shopping season comprising of Black Friday sale, Cyber Monday, Singles Day, Diwali, Christmas, Chinese New Year, etc. coming aorund, several emerging trends are reshaping the landscape of POS software and in the process, revolutionizing retail efficiency. This article will look at the key trends set to transform retail operations and enhance efficiency further for retail businesses using Point Of Sale Software.
Cloud-Based POS Systems
Cloud-based POS software is gaining widespread popularity due to its numerous advantages over traditional on-premises systems.
Accessibility and Flexibility: Cloud-based POS allows businesses to access their data and manage operations from anywhere, anytime, through internet-connected devices. This flexibility enhances mobility for retailers and enables remote management of multiple store locations.
Cost-Effectiveness: Cloud-based solutions eliminate the need for costly infrastructure investments, as the service provider hosts and maintains the software. This significantly reduces upfront expenses and allows businesses to pay for the services on a subscription or pay-as-you-go basis.
Real-Time Data and Analytics: Cloud-based POS systems provide real-time insights into sales, inventory, and customer data. This enables businesses to make data-driven decisions, monitor performance, and respond promptly to market trends and customer demands.
Mobile POS Solutions
Mobile POS solutions have emerged as a game-changer for retailers, enabling sales and customer interactions beyond the traditional cash register.
Mobility and Versatility: Mobile POS allows sales associates to complete transactions, check inventory, and access customer data directly from handheld devices. This flexibility enhances customer service by enabling in-store mobile checkout, reducing queues, and facilitating sales in various storage areas.
Pop-Up Stores and Events: Mobile POS empowers businesses to set up temporary or pop-up stores at events, exhibitions, or other off-site locations. This eliminates bulky cash registers and provides a seamless and efficient sales experience.
Personalized Customer Interactions:Mobile point-of-sale software enables sales associates to engage with customers on the shop floor, providing personalized recommendations, accessing product information, and facilitating transactions. This enhances customer satisfaction and fosters a more immersive shopping experience.
Integration with E-commerce Platforms
In an increasingly digital world, integrating POS software and e-commerce platforms is crucial for retailers aiming to offer a unified shopping experience.
Inventory Synchronization: Integration between POS and e-commerce platforms ensures that inventory levels are accurately synchronized across online and offline channels. This prevents overselling, enhances inventory management, and minimizes stockouts.
Seamless Order Management: Integrated POS and e-commerce solutions enable businesses to manage online orders, track shipments, and process returns from a centralized system. This streamlines operations and improves customer service by ensuring consistency and efficiency throughout the purchase journey.
Customer Data Consolidation: Integration allows for the consolidation of customer data, including purchase history and preferences, across all channels. This enables retailers to deliver personalized experiences, targeted promotions, and tailored recommendations, both online and offline.
Advanced Analytics and AI Capabilities
POS software equipped with advanced analytics and artificial intelligence capabilities offers valuable insights and automation for retailers.
Predictive Analytics: By leveraging historical data and AI algorithms, POS systems can provide predictive insights into sales trends, demand patterns, and customer behaviour. This enables proactive decision-making and more accurate demand forecasting.
Customer Segmentation: POS software can analyze customer data to identify segments and target specific customer groups with personalized offers and marketing campaigns. This improves customer engagement and fosters loyalty.
Inventory Optimization: AI-powered POS systems can optimize inventory management by automatically generating replenishment recommendations, identifying slow-moving products, and minimizing overstocks or stockouts. This ensures efficient inventory turnover and reduces carrying costs.
As we analyse the latest trends of Point Of Sale Software, businesses can expect enhanced efficiency, improved customer experiences, and data-driven decision-making. Cloud-based systems, mobile POS solutions, integration with e-commerce platforms, and advanced analytics with AI capabilities are set to redefine retail operations and empower businesses to thrive in the evolving marketplace. Embracing these trends will undoubtedly give retailers a competitive edge and position them for success in the digital age. Partnering with the right Retail Software Solutions provider that enables them to deploy forward-looking and robust retail POS software will also help the retail brands in elevating their retail performance in their journey to creating amazing customer experiences.
The phrase “migrating POS by POS, Casa by Casa” refers to a methodical and step-by-step approach to a migration process. “POS” stands for “Point of Sale,” which refers to the location where a transaction or sale takes place, often in retail. “Casa” is the Spanish word for “house” or “home.”
In this context, “migrating POS by POS, casa by casa” suggests that the migration process is being done one point of sale (or location) at a time, and one store (house or unit) at a time. This approach could be used, for instance, when upgrading or changing a system, software, or technology used for managing transactions in a retail business.
The process emphasizes a careful and systematic approach, likely to minimize disruption and ensure that each location or unit is migrated successfully before moving on to the next one.
Migrating a large number of very large stores, say 100+ stores each with a size of 5000+ sqm. to a new POS solution requires a well-planned and phased approach. Here’s how it could be done:
Pilot Testing: Before the full-scale migration begins, select a subset of stores to act as pilot locations. These stores will serve as test cases to ensure that the new POS solution functions effectively and can handle the unique requirements of the brand’s operations.
Customization and Configuration: Work closely with the POS solution provider to customize and configure the software according to the specific needs of your brand. This could include setting up inventory management, pricing, loyalty programs, and any other features that are crucial to your business.
Training: Train your store staff on how to use the new POS solution. This training should cover everything from basic transaction processing to handling returns, managing inventory, and generating reports. The training should be comprehensive and hands-on to ensure that the staff feels confident using the new system.
Phased Rollout: Divide the remaining stores into manageable groups based on factors like geographical location or operational similarity. Begin the migration process with one group at a time. This phased approach prevents overwhelming your IT team and allows for efficient troubleshooting and support.
On-Site Support: During the migration of each group of stores, provide on-site support from IT experts and POS solution specialists. This support can address any technical issues, answer questions from store staff, and ensure a smooth transition.
Parallel Operations: During the transition, consider running the old and new POS solutions in parallel for a short period. This allows for a comparison of results and helps identify any discrepancies or issues that need to be resolved before completely retiring the old system.
Continuous Communication: Maintain open communication with store managers and staff throughout the process. Keep them updated on the progress of the migration, address their concerns, and gather feedback to make necessary adjustments.
Feedback and Refinement: After each group of stores has migrated, gather feedback from store managers and staff about their experiences with the new POS solution. Use this feedback to refine the system and address any unforeseen challenges.
Scalability and Performance Testing: Given the large scale of your operation, it’s crucial to conduct scalability and performance testing on the new POS solution. Ensure that it can handle high transaction volumes without slowdowns or crashes.
Data Migration: If the new system requires historical sales and customer data, plan for a smooth transfer of this information from the old system to the new one. Data accuracy and integrity are paramount.
Finalization and Support: Once all stores have migrated, perform a final evaluation of the entire process. Provide ongoing support to address any post-migration issues and ensure that the stores are operating seamlessly with the new POS solution.
In essence, migrating a large number of stores with significant square foot coverage involves meticulous planning, thorough training, phased implementation, and constant communication. By taking these steps, you can mitigate the challenges associated with such a massive transition and ensure that each store experiences a successful migration to the new POS solution.
ETP has successfully executed over 500 enterprise software projects across 35,000+ stores for 500+ brands. ETP’s unique value proposition is its ability to consistently deliver enterprise-grade omni-channel solutions to leading luxury and lifestyle retailers with multiple stores having multiple formats.
The retail industry has always been full of challenges. With the COVID-19 pandemic particularly highlighting these challenges, today’s market conditions combined with the fast-evolving customer expectations dictate that retailers should fast-track digital innovation and transform traditional business models.
Customer experience is the new competitive battleground, and those retailers who are able to harness the power of data and technology to enhance the customer experience are winning in this battle of growing customer loyalty and trust and gaining greater market share. Acting on customer insights and implementing changes in processes, technology, and mindset for the digitalization of customer journeys gives you the necessary momentum for long-term success in retail.
Transition to the low-touch digital store
In spite of the significant growth of the e-commerce channel, stores remain key touchpoints in the customer shopping journey and are still driving between 70% and 90% of total retail sales. In-store retention and engagement are critical to building loyalty and driving a higher volume of sales. However, your customers expect digital experiences that go beyond shopping, while always ensuring their safety.
ETP Omni-channel Retail Software supports retailers in offering convenience services, such as mPOS-enabled queue management solutions and frictionless payments. These help ensure your customers have a pleasant, minimum-touch shopping experience, and ultimately spend more. Mobile POS solutions in your stores enable you to improve customer flow and ensure safety measures like social distancing are followed.
Coupled with user-friendly, innovative retail digital transformation solutions such as Endless Aisle (digital product catalogue), in-store advance orders, and targeted promotions, you can be certain of supporting in-store digital customer journeys and improving in-store customer engagement. From development and deployment to managing periodical updates to your retail software suite, ETP’s consulting, global deliveries, and support teams will take care of every step and provide promised results.
Offer superior omnichannel shopping experiences to your customers
Retailers’ growth drivers are now more strongly linked than ever before to their capacity to integrate the new journeys of digital customers. However, many retailers still manage their offline and online sales channels in silos.
Our expert business consultants leverage our integration capabilities to help you map customer journeys and unify all of your sales channels, order management, payment processing, loyalty programs, delivery options, and more, both in-store and out-of-store. This will enable you to deliver the true omnichannel experiences that your customers expect.
Empower your workforce to succeed in its new role
As the role of the store is reinvented, in-store employees will have a part to play as personal advisors to shoppers. With ETP Mobile Store, you can give your employees access to the tools and applications they need to succeed in these roles. These will be accessible from anywhere through secure mobile terminals and cover CRM, inventory management, order management and more.
There is an ongoing competition to recruit, retain and develop the best talent, particularly among millennials, who value a great employee experience. ETP Omni-channel Retail Solutions can improve the collective knowledge and performance of your teams by facilitating better teamwork.
Additionally, retailers can avoid any skills gap resulting from high workforce turnover and give proper career perspective to their employees. The Orange Digital Academy and User Adoption Program offers flexible solutions that help you ensure your employees are trained and aware of new policies and processes, including the implications of new COVID-19 regulations.
Enhance your operations and drive growth with leading-edge technology
With consumers seeking the best of both worlds between physical and online shopping, retailers must prepare for a hybrid future. Adopting emerging technologies will help them transform their value propositions with respect to how they can improve their customer’s life, and make it easier and more fulfilling. A bold digital transformation strategy requires immense collaboration across technology ecosystems but it will help ensure success for the retail business in the long term.
Retailers typically operate a complex distributed network of business locations: offices, stores and distribution centres. At the stores, in addition to the POS, they put tablets, video, digital signs and other technologies to work simultaneously. These technologies are having a profound impact on the business performance and customer loyalty. It is crucial to ensure that the locations, channels, and devices are not operating in silos, and the data collected by each of them is not stored individually. Also, the new solutions should be able to access and understand the data stored in the legacy systems quite easily.
Balancing inventory assortments, managing orders and maintaining uniform pricing across channels requires you deploy retail technology that gives you one version of the truth about your inventory and your customers irrespective of the device or channel.
ETP Omni-channel Retail Software helps you apply more granular levels of control for specific business processes along the end-to-end integration, security and build/deploy service delivery chain. With omni-channel orchestration, you can directly determine the most preferred method of order fulfilment for each customer, personalise promotions for them based on merchandise, location, time and/or customer hierarchies, and manage third-party integrations with ERP/legacy/such other systems. This ensures you can deliver the agility and responsiveness required to enhance the shopping experience at all your business locations.
Furthermore, ETP Connect allows you to bridge your online and offline channels, costs and IT estate while ensuring that all services work in harmony with the required governance level.
Innovation in retail has long been driven by new technologies and the desire to see what they can do. From video rental shops to Amazon, retailers have fallen over themselves to adopt tech that gives them an edge over the competition—and a bigger piece of the pie. Today, brick-and-mortar stores face much stiffer competition than their online rivals. After all, how can you compete with the convenience of shopping from the comfort of your own home? You could argue that you can’t. But I’m here to tell you there are still plenty of ways for physical retailers to use tech to innovate and get ahead in this brave new world. Here’s a look at just some of them:
Remember the days when customers visiting a store were greeted with a salesperson following them from aisle to aisle, making product recommendations and steering them towards the cash counter? It’s not that long ago that such practices were commonplace in retail. But today’s customers are more demanding than ever before—they want to be able to shop whenever and wherever they want, without being followed by a salesperson or being pushed into buying more than they need.
As shoppers now seek a more convenient method of shopping, it is imperative for brick-and-mortar stores to reinvent themselves by offering an omni-channel experience and creating a seamless shopping experience for their customers. While the use of technology can serve as an effective tool in achieving these goals, retail companies need to take the initiative to stay relevant and useful to customers.
The importance of leveraging technology cannot be overstated when it comes to transforming information into actionable insights in order to personalize interactions with shoppers. By doing so, organizations can create a superior customer experience that sets them apart from competitors who lack these capabilities.
The first step toward delivering this enhanced shopping experience is through digital technology that, among other things, enables data gathering at multiple touch points. This gives retailers access to a goldmine of customer information that helps businesses to remain relevant and useful to their customers.
But how do you use this data? How do you know what kind of information you should be collecting? How much should be collected? And how can it all be used effectively in order to improve the overall customer experience?
Data is truly a gift from heaven for retail companies—and not just because they can use it as part of their analytics efforts; data collection also provides important insights into consumer behaviour and preferences. With this knowledge in hand, companies are able to create personalized experiences for each individual shopper based on their shopping history and preferences rather than relying simply on demographic information such as gender or age range alone (which may not always accurately represent them). It also allows retailers greater insights into where there might be demand for new products/services or locations within stores, where consumers prefer spending time during different parts of their day (e.g., morning vs afternoon shifts) and so on.
The next step involves leveraging technology tools available today to transform that information into actionable insights. These insights can be used to personalize interactions with shoppers based on their unique browsing and buying patterns and to proactively address their changing needs throughout their journey, from purchase to return.
This is the heart of a customer-centric approach that can make all the difference in your store’s ability to get things right for your customers. With it, you will:
Use retail CRM tools to better understand how shoppers interact with your brand, which products they prefer — or don’t — and what messages resonate most with them
Use data analytical tools to help you identify common pain points across customers as well as groups within your base; this could include identifying which product categories are underperforming or where there are gaps in inventory (e.g., if multiple customers have been looking at specific items online but not buying them)
Use retail management software solutions such as the ETP V5.5 Store software coupled with the ETP Connect – a secured web services middleware or ecommerce management solutions such as Ordazzle powered by ETP, integrated with ERP systems from Oracle, SAP, Infor, and more so that retailers gain visibility into where/when orders come in from customers vs. where/when can they be fulfilled from.
Leverage mobile POS (mPOS) technology for providing value-added services including providing product information and price comparisons across channels. The ETP Mobile Store mobile POS software converts your store staff into intelligent assistants that can also help in inventory management by identifying which products are selling faster than others.
Additionally, retailers should use artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve customer service. For example, a retailer could install cameras at the entrance of the stores to monitor the flow of customers during peak shopping hours. This data can then be used to determine where additional staffing may be needed or identify bottlenecks along the customer journey so that employees can address them immediately.
Data analysis can also be used by retailers who want to deliver superior customer service as well as track consumer trends across the supply chain, helping them optimize inventory management practices and streamline production schedules.
Retailers have access to a wealth of consumer data thanks in part to social media. By leveraging this information, companies will be better equipped to serve customers’ needs by providing the products and personalised promotions they want when they want them—even before they know what those desires are.
The ability for companies to quickly identify consumer trends allows them to not only plan, but also to identify cross-selling opportunities.
Conclusion
Digital transformation is no longer an option for retailers, but a business imperative. If you’re not leveraging technology to drive innovation, the process of change will still happen — your competitors and customers will be the ones who lead it.
As a retailer, you are most likely already using a retail POS system a retail CRM system. But are you aware of the advantages of having these two systems integrated and working together? If you are, you are already well on your way toward achieving retail success. If you are not, then these programs are probably working against you.
There are many benefits to having an integrated POS and CRM solution including faster transaction time, detailed customer history, and improved customer experience, to name a few. In this article, we will focus specifically on the benefits of capturing detailed customer history, and how the collected data can be used effectively. When your retail POS and CRM are integrated with each other, all your retail sales data is immediately and automatically captured in the CRM – every sale, service request, and customer complaint is logged, giving you a detailed customer profile.
Complete customer profiles provide information that can be extrapolated and applied in a variety of ways.
First, imagine a customer that has come into your retail store — let’s say you specialize in wireless products. The customer browses around for a minute or two and settles on purchasing the latest Bluetooth speaker. When they get up to the till (retail POS solution) for billing, the sales representative scans the item and in doing so, the customer profile is brought forward from the retail CRM software and the sale can be attached to their account. At this point in the integrated system, the sales associate will be able to view this customer’s entire purchase history based on recency-frequency-monetary value and will have access to valuable upgrade information, using which he/she can cross-sell or upsell with additional correlated products, or share deals that may apply to this customer.
Secondly, the customer data you collected can be used to segment your customers as per their purchase history, upgrade eligibility, and even as far as demographic information that can help you identify your purchase audience. The key benefit here is, you can now begin hyper-targeting your customer base and hone marketing efforts based on these unique profiles that bring customers back into stores.
Finally, integrated data collection is a game-changer with the ability to take the customer data and include it in your communication to customers; this is referred to as personalization. The ability to use personalization in your marketing and customer relationship efforts goes a long way, and according to a report by Forrester, the biggest challenges with personalization are gaining insight quickly enough (40%), having enough data (39%), and deciphering what is inaccurate data (38%). With an integrated POS and CRM, these key issues with executing personalization are largely alleviated, connecting the sales and customer data and by displaying the information at the POS.
Think back to that customer who came in and bought the Bluetooth speaker. You have already captured their demographic information and because your CRM and POS are integrated, you now have their sales history including details of the product they bought, the store they bought it in, and the sales rep that sold it to them. With this information, a powerful, personalized email can be created and sent to them to make sure they are enjoying their purchase, generating customer loyalty and mostly repeat business.
So I will ask again, is your POS and CRM integrated with each other and working together?
