POS experience: 11 tips to satisfy your customers and increase sales

POS experience is a part of customer experience in a shopping journey, which occurs when a customer pays for their item at the in-store checkout counter.

From a marketing point of view, the POS is a strategic location because customers tend to make higher-margin purchasing decisions in physical stores compared to other touchpoints in their journey. Therefore, most businesses set up their POS near the exit to increase the rate of impulsive purchases before customers leave the store.

However, depending on the specific product category and business lines, POS locations may vary slightly to reach and influence consumers earlier in the sales funnel.

• There can be separate POS for individual product groups in department stores, such as clothing, electronics, and home appliances. Staff at these registers can actively advise consumers and promote products instead of just handling payment transactions.
• In addition, the POS type and features can influence purchasing behavior and profitability by providing flexible options for purchasing to customers.

1. Resolve inventory issues

Out of stock brings frustration to customers and reduces the revenue a business should have. Not buying the item they want also creates a non-recalling POS experience for your customers, and they may never return.

When integrated seamlessly with inventory management programs, POS systems can solve this difficulty with ease.

• Real-time inventory tracking, reconciliation, and inventory levels to make sure stores are always stocked
• Ensure item availability with a low stock alert, auto-replenishment, and restocking system

2. Provide fast checkout

Customers value time and tend to get impatient if the checkout process takes too long. If customers are ready to wait in line, make sure your payment processing is as quick and convenient as possible. As a retailer, you can accelerate that process by using an enhanced POS solution:

• Use barcode scanning instead of manual entry: Modern POS solutions often integrate extensive inventory management and barcode scanning functions to eliminate manual data entry and inventory errors. It’s an effective way to reduce checkout and checkout time and creates an impressively quick POS experience for customers.
• Check out on the sales floor: Make a payment transaction on the spot as soon as your customers make a purchase decision. Customers don’t need to queue to pay at the counter. However, this method requires a tablet or mobile POS system.

3. Accommodate various payment methods

To satisfy customers, retailers provide good products and understand their customers’ needs, including how they want to pay. So you’ll never know how many sales opportunities you’ll miss if you don’t meet your customer’s preferred payment method.

Thus, retailers need to offer a wide variety of payment options to stay competitive and win customers. An open-source system like Magento POS can integrate with the emergence and rapid change of new forms of payment, including:

• Cash
• Credit and debit cards
• Mobile wallet and e-wallets payments
• Gift card
• Buy Now, Pay Later
• QR Code
• Contactless or touchless payments
• Mobile payments like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay

Also, these electronic methods deliver a fast-paced POS experience and eliminate the case that customers have to find their wallets again to choose the suitable payment method for your store.

4. Offer prepaid store credit

Prepaid store credits can entice your customers to return to your store and prepare for future big purchases. You can use this approach, and customers only need to read or scan the customer card code to accept the transaction, which is a quick and convenient POS experience. Your staff can operate directly on the POS:

• Click on their name to display the customer card
• Link their account with prepaid credit
• Add in-store credit to the customer’s account

5. Provide multiple options for receipts

It would help if you offered multiple options for receipts. In addition to direct printing of paper receipts, sending email receipts is the best option. Many customers prefer to send electronic receipts because they want to save the environment and print waiting time. This POS experience improvement can enhance your brand image on customer’s hearts, and the main benefit is much more than that:

• When your customer gives you their email, POS can sync the data with the eCommerce system into the centralized database.
• You can create email marketing campaigns to inform customers about personalized promotions based on their preferences and purchase history based on POS data.

6. Implement omnichannel POS experience

A modern POS system can allow businesses to implement line-busting strategy and omnichannel POS experience effectively:

• Buy online, pick up at stores (BOPIS): Customers pay via eCommerce website or apps. Store staff prepares the ready goods, and customers can pick up items in the store, pickup truck, or curbside.
• Telephone orders: Customers place orders and pay over the phone.

These 2 methods reduce customer waiting times and minimize physical contact for safety during the COVID-19 period. Also, processing orders on the POS system reduces effort and human error when recording and preparing orders.

7. Facilitate self-service POS experience

Customers are increasingly accustomed to self-service, and many retailers have already successfully implemented it. For example, after adding self-service kiosks to some locations, McDonald’s sales increased by 5–6%.

Self-service POS is a customer-centric experience and truly trusts customers by giving shoppers more control to pay for their orders themselves.

Self-service kiosks also reduce queues and staff at the counter. It’s the best option for the food and service industry.

8. Improve customer service

An EPOS solution that integrates with eCommerce allows you to improve customer service throughout the entire shopping journey. In addition to quick payments, POS can provide a wealth of valuable tools to enhance the quality of service and excel POS experience:

• Build customer profiles: Collect customer data every time they interact with you. POS data helps you understand customer insights better. From there, easily personalize and tailor recommendations to each customer’s preferences.
• Create superior customer service: Equip mPOS or iPad POS for face-to-face consultation at floor sales. Your staff can look up more product information and give quick suggestions. If the store is out of stock, eCommerce POS integration can provide product availability information on other stores with a real-time updated figure.
• Try chatbot features on POS: Live chat is the most preferred support channel for millennials in the support channel rankings. However, 77% of customers feel they have to wait too long to connect to live support. In this case, chatbots are a viable alternative. Customers will receive answers immediately after asking questions. As a mutually beneficial solution, the business owner can reduce the labor cost.

9. Collect and act on more customer feedback

All of your efforts to gather and process feedback quickly make your customers feel heard. In addition, customer feedback provides more insight than purely quantitative approaches. However, recent research by RetailWise shows that:

• 44% of customers skipped or didn’t complete the service quality survey because the survey was too long.
• 32% of respondents are more willing to provide direct feedback.
• 19% of consumers want immediate feedback during the transaction, and 34% within 24 hours of purchasing.
• 52% of customers say that if they can give real-time feedback, a retailer can reduce their negative experience.

You can include the touchpoints on the POS experience journey so your customers can express their thoughts about your business:

• With a retail POS, store staff can ask customers to leave feedback and input into the system. Also, use automatic emailing to ask for feedback after purchasing at your POS.
• With self-service POS, it’s easier for customers to share their thoughts, so you should take advantage of these opportunities by adding review features.

10. Automate rewards and loyalty programs

Loyalty programs are an effective customer retention solution that encourages higher spending and repeats purchases.

• 5% of loyal customers can increase sales by 75%.
• Customers who join a loyalty program tend to spend 37% more than regular customers.

However, it needs to be easy to use and sign up for a loyalty program.

• 28% of Gen Z shoppers refuse to sign up for a loyalty program because it’s time-consuming.
• 40% of consumers find it hard to earn any rewards from loyalty programs.

Your POS can help with that by:

• Adding customers to your loyalty program at the counter: Accumulate and redeem points for customers every purchase.
• Integrating foot traffic analysis technology with POS system: In addition to knowing what products your customers buy, you can track customers interacting with other products and moving around your store for a better POS experience.
• Setting up automated marketing campaigns: Send personalized emails at the right time and taste based on customer POS data to increase open rates and revenue per email.

11. Design product displays based on data-driven insights

As the most significant differentiator from online shopping, in-store visual merchandising plays a vital role in creating the POS experience. But 50% of retail displays launch later than expected because retail businesses often have to wait weeks for enough data to analyze their display’s performance.

Thanks to a modern POS system, you can collect data in real-time and instantly get metrics reports. POS data analysis helps you evaluate the effectiveness of your screen revenue and make the right decisions.

A quality POS system can enhance your brand image and the in-store customer experience. In addition to improving the checkout performance and other retail processes, POS captures valuable data about customers’ shopping habits and provides real-time reports. From the customer’s purchase history analysis, POS offers personalized discounts that increase customer loyalty and repeat shopping.

Deploying a POS system that fits your business model is a worthy investment because POS experience can help you grow revenue sustainably.