Industry Trend Report - Retail Store IT Spending

Industry Trends

The 10th Annual IHL/RIS News Store Systems Study, "2013 Changes in Store: Mobility Meets Retail's Big Data" includes a number of statistics and covers: IT spend growth in 2013 POS vendors Trends in mobility The report shows that, in the retail segment, Specialty Softgoods retailers are "out front again, with a 5.7% increase over last year, with store ‐level mobile solutions Cross Channel capabilities and Advanced CRM, with a bit of POS Software thrown in, as being the drivers." Check out the full report.  Are you in the US and in need of no cost retail point of sale advice? I'm happy to help and can be reached on my cell at 208-340-5632 (mountain time) or via email at kevinantosh@gmail.com.

Upcoming Updates to NCR CounterPoint Mobile (CP Mobile)

Some information to pass along from NCR related to the next release of NCR CounterPoint Mobile (CP Mobile):

Upcoming NCR Counterpoint Mobile Releases

We’re expecting our next version of NCR Counterpoint Mobile to be released in the next four to five weeks, and to contain the following: IOS7 Support.   We expect IOS7 to be released in roughly the next month– we’ve been working with developer versions and want to make sure when it is released that we’re ready for it in advance. Support fixes related to NCR Counterpoint servers running WinXP variants and other crashes based on our diagnostic data collected from the field. Ongoing: We are currently working in development with the Linea Pro 5 sled that supports the Lightning connector for iPhone 5 and iPod Touch 5.  It does require a new SDK from Infinite Peripherals, which has not been released and does not have an ETA.   When the SDK is released, we will ensure it works properly for NCR Counterpoint Mobile and include support for it in a subsequent release. Are you in the US and in need of no cost retail point of sale advice? I'm happy to help and can be reached on my cell at 208-340-5632 (mountain time) or via email at kevinantosh@gmail.com.

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.