Tuesday Tip - Setting Up "Walk-In" Customers (and why)

Most specialty retail stores track each customer individually.  After all, we spend a lot of marketing dollars to get someone in to our store for the first time – why not keep the customer coming back?

Point of sale programs are great at tracking customer purchase history and for generating sales and marketing reports to target that top 20% of your customers that generate 80% of your stores revenue.

But what about the “one of” customer? This would be a customer that is making a one time purchase and it is highly unlikely that they will ever visit your store again. Or this could also be a customer that doesn’t want to share any of their information with your store?

We already know that Microsoft RMS Store Operations and NCR CounterPoint can be set to require selecting a customer for every transaction mandatory, make selecting a customer for each transaction optional, or selecting a customer for each transaction is not required.

You want your staff to be “in the habit” of always asking for at least some basic customer information – if the staff knows that the point of sale system is set to make selecting a customer for each transaction optional or not required, then it is likely that they will skip the step altogether.  

The easiest way to make sure that everyone stays in the habit of selecting a customer for each and every transaction is to set up a “Walk-In Customer”.  As you can see from the screen shots below for both Microsoft RMS Store Operations and NCR CounterPoint, this is a very easy way to include a customer for transactions where the customer may be “one of” or was not interested in sharing any personal information with your store.

Here is a basic "Walk-In Customer" in Microsoft RMS Store Operations:

 

And the same setup in NCR CounterPoint SQL:

 

(I probably should not have their credit limit set as "unlimited" - my error!)

Of note:  depending on your receipt settings – “Walk-In Customer” may or may not appear on the receipt. You may want to check with your point of sale partner if this is a concern to you.