Due to constantly increasing competition, today’s retail companies are expected to be agile, efficient, and fast. Investing in digital tools can help your business stand out, increase operational efficiency, streamline processes, boost sales, enhance customer satisfaction, and give you a hedge over your competition, helping your business grow and thrive. These tools can also better your planning and reduce overheads.
Digital tools enable retail businesses to minimize inventory costs, facilitate and automate inventory control, track margins, improve forecasting, and ensure timely supplier relationships. They’re a worthy investment to consider. Here are eight digital tools every retailer should have.
1. POS system
A POS (point of sale) system is an essential operation investment every retailer should have. Customers don’t like wasting time in long queues waiting to complete their purchases. With a POS system, you can optimize your checkout process, reducing the possibility of consumers leaving without buying. Customers prefer retailers who offer multiple payment options. Investing in POS software can help you achieve this while giving your brand a great first impression. A POS solution collects all inventory, customer, and sales data, which you can use to calculate and initiate marketing campaigns that motivate consumers to visit your store.
POS software that supports integrating programs like gift vouchers or membership can help attract new customers to your retail business while promoting repeat purchases. Since retailers find it challenging to maintain accuracy with their inventory, POS is an effective solution that lets you track and manage your items in real time. This increases inventory visibility and reduces losses.
2. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software
Quality customer experience is crucial for any retailer who wants to set themselves apart from their competition while ensuring their business thrives. Excellent customer experience depends on the services you provide and the extent to which the experience is personalized. Leveraging the customer data you gather from the CRM software enables you to customize each customer’s experience by targeting them with personalized campaigns, making them feel happy and appreciated, and increasing customer loyalty.
Investing in CRM lets you centralize every aspect of your retail business, meaning customer queries and complaints will never go unnoticed and are addressed in order of priority. This streamlines customer communications and enhances customer service.
3. Accounting software
Traditional accounting practices make it difficult for retailers to keep up with increasing finance and accounting records while consuming valuable business time. They also result in inaccurate accounting, which can significantly impact every business operation stage. With an accounting system, you can manage your finances properly and automate workflow tasks, transaction matching, invoice generation, and spreadsheet reconciliations.
Ideal accounting software should help you track sales and inventory taxes, generate basic financial statements, including balance sheet and income statements, and monitor your expenses and income. It also enables you to manage payroll. This gives the accounting team enough time to focus on more crucial tasks, eliminates human error, and ensures information accuracy.
4. Help desk software
Customers are every retail business’s backbone, and the experience you offer them determines its success. Online consumers struggle with poor user experience, insecurity, and slow responses. However, investing in help desk software can help you manage and improve your customer experience efficiently. Help desk software such as a support ticket or ticketing system can help you create, manage, and maintain customer concern lists.
With this information, your customer representatives can address customer issues quickly. Ticketing systems also ensure effective engagements between your customer service team and consumers. The right help desk software can help you improve productivity and customer interactions.
5. Email management software
Email management software allows you to sort, manage, arrange, and send emails, increasing efficiency. It also offers you insightful customer data to improve their experience. Email management software lets you determine your team’s performance and email usage. An ideal email management system captures your contacts in insightful customer profiles showing business information, contact details, and past contact moments.
The right email management software should seamlessly integrate with the rest of your retail business’s systems, ensuring a unified platform. It should display insightful reports, including email numbers, closing rates, response rates, and customer satisfaction. It should also support auto-replies and quick replies, automate workflow and enhance collaboration via a shared team inbox.
6. Inventory management software
Investing in inventory management software is an excellent way to ensure efficient retail operation. This system is a set of products, processes, and applications that help you adequately manage and track inventory. Proper inventory management usually increases returns on investment. An inventory management system automates inventory, significantly reducing operating costs and saving storage space.
With an inventory management system, you can eliminate costly write-offs and receive current inventory data notifications. Consider barcode integration, pre-built reporting, vendor management, notifications and alerts, licensing, cycle and audit counts, and mobility functionalities when looking for inventory management software.
7. ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system
An ERP system enables you to manage your retail business’s resources with simplicity and ease. It integrates various business aspects, including managing multi-location retail stores, pricing changes, regularly moving stock, discount offers, and more. Some ERP tools are POS system integrated, providing accurate, real-time data. ERP systems help you track the supply chain, orders, services, and inventory movement. With an ERP system, you can oversee customer information, history, and interactions, better equipping your sales team to engage with consumers.
A well-built ERP system can help your retail business improve productivity, reduce human error, enhance revenue, improve resource control, and ensure better data security.
An ERP systems like ERP cloud hosting experts with cloud compatibility increases overall resource accessibility while offering other cloud-related advantages like better database management and response times.
8. Digital signage displays
The retail industry’s competition is constantly increasing. Investing in digital signage solutions can help your business stand out while increasing conversions and sales. You can display your brand’s message, beliefs, aspirations, and values through digital signage, and educate consumers about your business’s history, success, and achievement stories. This can help increase brand awareness.
Digital signage enables you to deliver timely dynamic content at the right place, maximizing ROI. With point-of-sale digital signage in your retail store, you can ensure great cross-selling and upselling touch points, tapping into impulse buying behavior to increase overall sales.
Endnote
Digital tools are an excellent way for retail businesses to streamline their processes, save time, and increase productivity. Familiarize yourself with this digital tool every retailer should have.
