There’s a lot more to your point of sale (POS) system than just processing transactions. Your POS can capture a wealth of data about your customers, from how much they spend to the products they buy the most.
If you know how to use POS data correctly, it can help you improve how you engage your customers – and give you a competitive edge.
Customer engagement is how your brand interacts with its customers, both in-store and online. The goal of customer engagement is to give customers more reasons to do two things:
Essentially, it’s about finding ways to increase customer loyalty to gain a bigger share of their wallet. However, to grow loyalty, you need to better understand your customers.
This isn’t a problem for the local butcher in a small village, for example. They can increase loyalty by engaging with every customer on a one-to-one basis. They can talk to shoppers, learn more about their lives, discover what they do and don’t like to buy. This information helps them tailor offers and incentives that will keep customers coming back.
However, larger retailers need to achieve this at scale, which is a major challenge. How do you grow customer loyalty when you process hundreds of thousands of transactions every day?
This is where your POS data can help. It enables you to get to know your customers and engage with them at a personal level, but on a massive scale.
To do this effectively, you need to track customer data to build up a picture of their preferences and behaviors over time. You can track loyalty card data or use a 1:1 payment token that tracks shopping habits based on purchases made on a payment card. Alternatively, you can create a proxy token that uses key payment information that’s visible on a receipt. While not fully unique, proxy tokens do have a very high success rate of identifying individual customers.
The more data you have, the better you’ll understand your customers, and the easier it will be to know how to engage them effectively.
Most retailers have a wide range of promotional offers available to customers at any one time. With insights gleaned from POS data, you can discover the perfect combination of offers that will drive customer loyalty on an individual basis, and deliver those offers via a coupon at the till.
There are several ways to approach this. You could deliver offers on products that you know they already buy and love. Or you can look at the data to see what other people most frequently buy with those items. Then you can create offers that incentivize that customer to try products they don’t buy but would very likely appeal to them.
Product category data can also reveal opportunities for engagement. For instance, you might learn that a customer only buys fruit and veg from your retailer once every ten visits. A discount coupon on fruit and veg will encourage them to buy from that category at your stores more often.
Store layout plays a major role in driving engagement. Customers want to find the products they’re looking for quickly and easily.
POS data reveals which products your customers typically have in the same basket, which can help streamline the layout of your store. For example, you might discover that people frequently buy kitchen towels and handwash together, indicating that you should position these products near each other in the store for a smoother shopping experience.
Customer engagement isn’t just about in-store interactions. You can also engage them outside of your store as well, via channels like email and apps.
Of course, to engage customers with email, you’ll need their email addresses, which you might have captured through a loyalty program. However, not every retailer uses a loyalty program, and even when they do, not every customer will sign up to one.
Alternatively, your cashiers can capture customer emails at POS in-store by offering to send them digital receipts or sign them up to a mailing list for the latest offers and updates. Your email capture rate depends on how effectively your staff can engage customers at the till. Once again, POS data can help.
Your POS captures data down to the till and cashier level. You can find out how many email addresses individual cashiers have captured. Using this information, you can offer rewards to cashiers that capture the most in a month as an incentive to drive staff engagement and increase your email capture rate.
Customer engagement might sound simple in theory – giving shoppers reasons to visit your stores more often and spend more money. Getting it right, however, can be complex and challenging.
Engagement spans many different areas of your business, from in-store and online interactions to the promotions you provide and the products on your shelves. But with smart use of your POS data, you can make better decisions around engaging customers to ensure they keep coming back to you, not your competitors.
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