If you are planning to subscribe to a POS software to record your sales in a systematic manner, or if you already have a billing software, then you should consider using that POS software for a very important activity that will help you improve business—data collection and analysis.
Data collected through POS software can be of high value to businesses. Know the type of data you can collect through your billing software and use it wisely to improve your business.
Here’re a few types of data you should be collecting and analyzing through your paid or free POS billing software.
Customer contact information
Businesses should collect contact data of each customer purchasing with them. This helps businesses in issuing transactional messages to customers. This also helps in creating a database of customers to whom marketing messages can be sent, when required.
Contact information of customers is one of the most valuable data that businesses collect. Every time your sales staff processes an order, they should map the order to an individual customer and their contact information like phone number and email address. Businesses can also use this data to collect customer feedback, get referrals and build a customer community.
Purchase basket of customers
Data collected through POS software gives you insight into baskets of goods that customers purchase with you. This data helps you profile customers into different categories and it even helps merchandisers identify the products that are purchased together often.
This valuable data can be used by businesses to optimize their store’s visual merchandising and inventory. You can place complementary products together in the store to increase the basket size of customers. You can also package complementary products together to improve revenue. Merchandisers can study customers’ purchase baskets and plan their inventory well.
Time and seasonal preference
With the help of customer purchase data you can understand which customers purchase what at what time and in what season. This information is of great value for merchandisers, as they can plan what to stock when. Optimizing inventory can save a lot of money and effort for your store and can improve its profitability.
With seasonal data in hand, you can plan your merchandise in advance, so that you have everything you need to fulfil all the orders placed at your stores. You can also identify days on which certain products are in high or low demand and, hence, plan your shelf display and stock accordingly. Such activities help you prevent wastage of products and ensure that you always have what your customers need.
Suitable prices
Customer purchase data also helps you understand the prices at which customers like to purchase certain items. If you have similar items with different price points, you can see which profile of customers like to purchase what. You can also calculate the price elasticity of each product at your store.
Price elasticity reflects the change in demand when the price of product changes. For highly price elastic products, you can keep constant pricing, or drop prices during discount periods. For low price elasticity products you can charge a premium, wherever possible. Your POS software will provide you data on what products were purchased at what price, and from that price elasticity data can be derived.
Effective incentive
Your retail store billing software will also give you data about the kind of rewards and incentives that work with your audience. You can analyze the change in demand after a certain discount offer is launched. You can also track which discount code was used more to purchase with you.
Such data helps you create offers and rewards that your customers actually value. Some customers prefer cash backs, some like to earn points that can be redeemed on future purchases, and some like to earn preferential treatment at your stores. You can identify which incentive works the most for your customers and then improve that over time to generate maximum value for your customers, so that you can attract more patrons.
Popular marketing channels
Customer purchase data also helps you identify the marketing channels that get you the most customers. You can run a survey at your point of sale to understand where your customers heard about you first. You can also keep track of the discount codes brought in from different marketing channels.
This valuable information will help you focus your resources on marketing channels that are the most effective or the ones that show potential for improvement. In this manner, POS software can help make your marketing efforts cost-effective and focussed. You can also send marketing SMS, emails, etc. to registered customers to bring them back to your store through your POS software.
Rush and slow hours
With the help of your sales data, you can identify the time periods when you have a lot of traffic in your stores. This will enable you to prepare your checkout counters and sales staff in advance, so that you can process all orders successfully and efficiently. You can also plan your inventory accordingly.
Sales data also helps you identify slow hours. This information can be used to create marketing activities that will help you attract more users during those hours. Some of these activities include running happy hours, offering value-added services, sending reminder messages to customers to return to your store for better value and so on. Such activities can help you improve your revenue over time.
Checkout efficiency
Data from your POS software will tell you the average time it takes to process an order at the checkout counter. If your checkout time is very high, then you can improve operational efficiency by using various features of your POS software that will help you streamline all tasks required to complete an order and collect payment.
Your billing software will reflect rush hours, so that you can decide if you need to add more cash registers at your store or if you need to remove any. This helps you optimize your staff and also enables you to keep your checkout time at a satisfactory level. Studies show that the ideal checkout time for stores is about four minutes, to keep your customers satisfied.
Merchandising efficiency
Your sales data also helps you understand how optimally your merchandisers had prepared your inventory. You can audit inventory to track over and under-stocking of goods. As you process each sale through your POS software, the inventory in the system automatically gets updated.
This helps you know at all times if you need to order a product or hold off its ordering to a later date. In this manner you can ensure that your store is always optimally stocked. You save a lot of precious resources by not blocking them in slow moving products and by channelling them towards products that generate high revenue in a period of time. Inventory audits should be done periodically to ensure that your stores are always optimally stocked.
Employee performance
One very important thing that you can do with the help of the data collected by your POS software is to manage your staff well. You can monitor the sales processed by each staff member at your cash registers with retail POS billing software like Loyera, as each sales person has to login with their unique ID to process an order.
You can also see how efficiently certain activities were undertaken in your merchandising, sales, delivery and other related departments, so that you can incetivize each department accordingly. This will also help you decide if you need to add or remove employees in any department to ensure that it runs smoothly and with cost-effectiveness.
Utilize such data collected by your paid or free pos billing software, so that you can take sound business decisions and can create a valuable customer database to attract customers back to your stores.