The tools retailers need to succeed

In the forever changing climate of digital technology, it’s so important that you take the right measures in order to stay ahead of the game. As a retail business, there are a number of ways that you can increase customers, profit, and engagement, and put your business in the running to be industry-leading. These are the tools you need.

A Dedicated Team

Utilising people with the right set of skills for specialised jobs is the most effective way to ensure productivity and long-term success. If a member of staff has a particular specialisation, use it. This is the same for 3rd parties and agencies. Utilising external skills, whether that’s systems and tech or a team of people can go a long way to helping you turn a so-so customer experience into something exceptional.

Social Media Understanding

This leads us to social media understanding. Note we don’t mean engagement, per say, but instead, analytics and data behind the interactions. What are the people who buy your products or services interested in? By understanding more about your prospects and loyal customers, you can start a two-pronged attack of both encouraging upselling activity from current customers to enticing an entirely new audience.

Forecasting

Particularly in this day and age, it’s essential that as a business, you’re constantly looking ahead. Forecasting in retail involves utilizing existing data to predict future events and, more specifically, consumer behaviour. When forecasting helps the retailer to meet the demands of the customer by understanding consumer purchase patterns better, more efficient use of shelf and display space within the retail establishment is the result, in addition to optimal use of inventory space. This doesn’t stop at your own data or that of a third party. Understanding economic changes such as unemployment rates, the rate of inflation, levels of household debt, available disposable income, and growth of the national gross domestic product can all have an effect on sales and should form part of your planning strategy.

In-house analytics

It’s easy to have a tool for every area of your business, be it some for marketing, some for in store, some for till systems and some for you gift card or loyalty platforms. Where retailers can maximise profit is by tying this data all together so you have a more concrete understanding of who is engaging with your business, what people are buying and where they are coming from. For example, some point of sale (POS) tech may include features and tools that you can use to collect relevant data for marketing purposes, or to capture information with its own built-in customer database. This progressive technology allows businesses - large and small - to organise, automate, and synchronise some aspects of customer interaction for marketing, sales, customer service, and support – but if that information isn’t making it back to every area of your business, you’re missing out on valuable insights and opportunities.

This is where we can help!

One of Tranxactor's major strengths is our ability to provide integration at the POS allowing real time interaction with a customer while they are at the checkout.  Using insights derived from this integration coupled with real-time data, we can incentivise and reward against such things as items in the basket.  In addition to connectivity at the POS, we can connect simultaneously across many different environments enabling a seamless customer experience through the web, mobile, point-of-sale and other touchpoints such as social media and kiosks.

The rich data we help you gather from each shopping visit provides insights to develop a deeper understanding of your customers and their shopping influencers. Our ability to react to events in real time can help you meet a number of strategic objectives, be it increased transaction value; larger basket size; increased frequency; faster repeat visit; lower cost per transaction; or higher customer lifetime value, the outcome will be a transaction and a satisfied customer. Interested? Talk to us today. Click here to speak to our UK office.